OTTAWA — Rogers wants to sell most of its data centres as it tries to reduce the debt it took on to buy former rival Shaw, The Logic has learned.

Documents describing the opportunity to possible buyers say the telecom giant wants to package nine of its 13 data centres in and around Canadian cities and sell them as a distinct business. Rogers would remain a major customer.

The facilities hold “co-located” servers for other companies that want to keep their key systems in buildings with features the Rogers centres offer, such as high security, special cooling systems and redundant power supplies. They also hold servers for cloud and similar shared services, and conduits for internet bandwidth.

Rogers’s data centres have a lot of unused capacity, the documents say.

Commercial realty firm CBRE’s most recent report on the global data centre market found demand rising everywhere. But data centres are energy hogs and a shortage of electricity to run them is a key problem, so the Rogers centres’ guaranteed access to power they aren’t yet using could be valuable to the right owner.

When The Logic asked Rogers about the potential sale, spokesperson Sarah Schmidt answered with an excerpt from the company’s Feb. 1 earnings call, in which chief financial officer Glenn Brandt talked about paying down debt. She highlighted Brandt’s mention of selling non-core assets.

“Succinctly, prudent capital management, focused execution on cost synergy generation and EBITDA growth, combined with targeted selling of non-core assets, is working and we are de-levering ahead of schedule,” Brandt said on the call. Rogers hoped to raise $1 billion through asset sales this year, he said.

Rogers owed nearly $40.9 billion in long-term debt at the end of 2023—though the company had paid down about $2.75 billion in its previous quarter—according to its financial report for the period. That was up from just under $18.7 billion at the start of 2022, an increase driven by its borrowing to buy Shaw.

“We’re well on our way to deleveraging our balance sheet back to pre-Shaw acquisition levels, and doing it ahead of plan,” chief executive Tony Staffieri said on that earnings call.

Scotiabank, which the documents show is assisting Rogers with the sale, did not reply to questions about its involvement.

Rogers built up its data centre business on a mini-spree more than a decade ago, buying and consolidating three smaller companies—Blackiron Data, Pivot Data Centres and Granite Networks—and opening its own high-end data centre in Calgary.

In October 2020, Rogers competitor Bell sold 25 data centres (in 13 sites) for more than $1 billion in cash, to U.S.-based Equinix.

Data centres are a hot business, as companies thirst for “compute” to run ever more cloud-based software and demanding artificial-intelligence applications. But all the Big Three Canadian telcos’ current and former holdings put together, including the seven sites Telus claimed in its most recent annual report, would still be relatively small.

Brookfield Infrastructure scooped up at least two groups of data centres last year, building up a portfolio of over 135 centres. Bell’s buyer, Equinix, now runs more than 85 such sites in the Americas alone.