Digital Realty Trust said "Oui! Oui!" to Paris with a three-property data center buyfrom one of France's largest telecoms for over $100M. The REIT announced this week that it purchased 87k SF of Tier III data centers, totaling 5MW of power, inMontigny-le-Bretonneux, Bievres, and Saclay. (Apologies to our junior high French teacher, because we can't pronounce them anymore.)In turn, Bouygues Telecom fully leased back the facilities with long-term, triple-net leases.

Digital Realty has been striving to increase its international footprint in recent months, something VP Andrew Schaap(above) hinted to us last year during our DICE conference in DC. Recently, the firm paid more than $1B for the Sentrum portfolio in England, totaling 761k SF.(Is data in Great Britain more polite, or does it just sound that way?) Even more recently, Rackspace filed info with the SEC detailing an agreement with Digital Realty, in which it will develop three more facilities for Rackspace in the UK. Rackspace, in turn, will lease the facilities (which have a 10 MW critical load power) for 20 years.