Liberty Global and investment company Digital Colony unveiled plans for a joint venture to take advantage of increasing demand for data centre facilities serving 5G, IoT, gaming and edge compute applications in Europe.

The new company is expected to begin operation in Q3 subject to regulatory approval and will be known as AtlasEdge. Initially it will have more than 100 active sites contributed by the communication business units.

Liberty Global will move some of its digital infrastructure assets in Europe into the venture and supply “strategic and operational support” while Digital Colony will contribute its expertise and capital to fund what the two describe as a “significant growth and consolidation opportunity in edge co-location services across Europe”.

The business will initially serve Liberty Global’s businesses interests in four of its European markets: Virgin Media in the UK and Republic of Ireland; Sunrise-UPC in Switzerland; and UPC in Poland. The intention is for AtlasEdge is to then tap into demand from cloud providers, streaming services and enterprises to support applications at the edge of mobile networks.

Digital Colony CEO Marc Ganzi said the venture would unlock “the growth potential of Liberty’s digital real estate holdings and capitalise on the emerging demand we are seeing for edge compute across Europe”.

Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries added: “Since several of our operating companies will become anchor tenants, Liberty Global customers will also benefit from better and more responsive services.”

Financial terms or make-up of the joint venture were not disclosed.

Digital Colony is a digital infrastructure investment company, which has been striking deals with a operators and technology companies for towers, data centres and other assets in recent years through various subsidiaries.

Earlier this year it agreed to buy DAS and Wi-Fi specialist Boingo Wireless for $854 million.