Digital Realty Trust is investing $874m (€772.5m) in a European data centre portfolio.

The US company, a data centre specialist, said it would buy eight high-quality, carrier-neutral data centres in Europe from Equinix.

Five of the assets are in London, two in Amsterdam and one in Frankfurt.

Digital Realty chief executive A William Stein said the deal, due to close later this year, would increase the company’s scale in Europe.

“We have made several recent strategic investments in Europe,” he said, “and this new portfolio – concentrated in three of the most strategically important data centre and interconnection hubs in Europe – will immediately bring on-board a large, diversified customer base and also provide significant opportunities to grow and extend our footprint across the continent for years to come.”

Digital Realty will take an interest in one of the two Amsterdam assets, while buying leasehold interests in the other seven data centres.

The 213,000sqft portfolio has an average remaining lease term of around 23 years.

The company said Equinix had an option to buy a facility from Digital Realty in Paris for $215m.

The portfolio, which serves 650 blue-chip clients, is 72% utilised.