Microsoft will invest $680 million (US$500 million) in Quebec digital infrastructure, including new data centres, over the next two years.

The data centres will be constructed in L’Ancienne-Lorette, Donnacona, Saint-Augustin-de-Desmaures, and Levis, the U.S.-based computing giant announced Wednesday.

Levis is a suburb of Quebec City. The other three communities are located within 45 kilometres of the provincial capital.

Microsoft said the investment will increase its local cloud computing infrastructure footprint by 750% across Canada. Construction on the data centres will start in coming months.

The investment reflects ongoing strong international investor appetite for Canadian data centres.

In early November, U.S.-based Cologix purchased fellow American firm Cyxtera’s data-centre business in Montreal and Vancouver. The deal coincided with insolvent Cyxtera’s agreement to sell substantially all of its assets, including seven U.S. data-centre properties, to Canada’s Brookfield Infrastructure Partners for US$775 million in a court-supervised process.

In September, Stack Infrastructure delivered the first phase of its Toronto data-centre campus. And, in August, Japan’s KDDI Corporation purchased a downtown Toronto data-centre portfolio from Allied REIT for $1.35 billion.

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