Compass Montreal (Baie-d'Urfé) data center, Baie-d'Urfé, Quebec

Compass Datacenters owns a data center at 19701 Clark Graham Avenue in Baie-d'Urfe, Montreal, Quebec, that it acquired in 2019 when it bought the Montreal wholesale data center provider Root Data Center. Compass completed the Root purchase on July 23, 2019, its first acquisition after announcing a plan to develop up to $3 billion in new data center campuses; financial terms were not disclosed.

Root operated two data centers in Montreal, known as MTL-R1 and MTL-R2, with combined capacity of about 65 megawatts of power once its MTL-R1 building finished expanding; Root said MTL-R2 was the largest wholesale data center in Canada. Root claimed its facilities exceeded Uptime Institute Tier III requirements, though the Uptime Institute had not certified them, Data Center Dynamics reported.

"Montreal's ample fiber capacity and inexpensive supply of renewable power via Hydro-Quebec enables cloud/hyperscale companies to achieve their sustainability goals while also growing at the pace necessary to meet demand", said AJ Byers, Root's chief executive, who joined Compass as president, international. "With this acquisition, Compass immediately becomes one of the top three wholesale providers in Montreal and gains an experienced management team there that can enable continued expansion in the area and beyond", said Kelly Morgan, vice president of research at The 451 Group.