MTS announced the acquisition of GDTs Energy Group, the owner of the GreenBush data center facility in Moscow’s Zelenograd suburb, for RUB 5.2 billion including net debt.

The GreenBush Data Center will have a capacity of 19 MW to power 2,280 racks in 24 server rooms totaling some 5,220 square meters of floor space.

A resident of a tax-privileged special economic zone (SEZ), the center is already serving hundreds of clients following the commissioning of the first of its three planned modules, with the remaining two expected to be brought online in the near future.

Igor Egorov, Vice President for Infrastructure Development, said: “MTS has become one of the largest data center players in Russia thanks to our balanced strategy of building out modular data centers as well as opportunistically looking at attractive assets on the market.”

The Russian data center market is expected to grow more than 20 percent annually over the next several years.

MTS plans to use the facility’s additional capacity to market colocation and cloud solutions to third parties — including more than 25 services under the #CloudMTS brand — as well as to help meet the company’s own compute and storage needs.

The GreenBush facility will become the 12th major data center in MTS’s nationwide network, including four in Moscow, two in Nizhny Novgorod, and one each in Moscow Region, Leningrad Region, Samara, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, and Krasnodar.