In the latest deal the roll up corporate data centers into independent providers, Equinix Inc. said today it’s buying 29 of Verizon Communications Inc.’s data centers for $3.6 billion.

The deal comes a month after CenturyLink Inc. sold 57 data centers to a Wall Street consortium for $2.15 billion. Verizon agreed to offload its cloud facilities to the giant provider of data center services to enterprises and other organizations to focus on its media properties.

Verizon obtained many of the data centers through its 2011 purchase Terremark Worldwide Inc., which was meant to establish a beachhead in the lucrative  infrastructure-as-a-service market. But the telco has struggled to gain market share due to intense competition from entrenched providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. with its Azure platform.

Selling the facilities will enable Verizon to focus on what it views as more promising growth areas such as digital publishing and advertising, where its soon-to-be-completed acquisition of Yahoo Inc. is set to play a central role. The reasoning behind the deal is similar to that which drove CenturyLink to offload its own data centers. The latter firm, which ranks as the third-largest carrier in the U.S., wants to free up resources for its core connectivity business.

As part of the effort, CenturyLink announced plans to acquire fiber-optic network operator Level 3 Communications Inc. for $3.4 billion a couple weeks before selling off its hosting facilities. The deal is set to buy the company 200,000 route miles of Internet cabling including 33,000 worth of submarine links stretching across multiple continents. For Equinix, the agreement with Verizon represents a similarly important expansion.

The company is set to gain over 2 million square feet of data center capacity in 15 metro areas throughout the Americas. Among them are hotspots such Houston and Bogotá where Equinix does not yet have a presence, which should fast-track its infrastructure expansion efforts. Without the deal, the company would have had to build its own facilities from scratch.

On a competitive level, meanwhile, Verizon’s data centers will enable Equinix to reach more customers and better support latency-sensitive workloads that must be deployed near the information sources they use. The shorter the physical distance is, the lower the network delay becomes. It’s why the company giant recently forged a partnership with storage startup Iguazio Inc. to provide co-location services for joint clients.

Equinix will have 175 data centers throughout 43 markets after the Verizon deal’s expected completion in the middle of next  year.

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