Cologix Brand Guidelines: A Denver Interconnection Firm of 2010, Stonepeak & Coded Sites

A Dallas carrier hotel, then Montréal.

Cologix is a network-neutral interconnection and data-centre company headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company says it has been operational since December 2010, and its own history lists a first acquisition that year: a Dallas data centre, now called DAL1, bought from Navisite. English Wikipedia places Cologix’s Dallas space in the Infomart, the city’s carrier hotel, where the company runs a meet-me room in which networks connect to one another.

The early backers were named publicly in 2017, when Data Center Frontier reported the company’s sale to Stonepeak. They included Grant van Rooyen, then chief executive and chairman, the van Rooyen Group, Columbia Capital, Greenspring Associates and company management. A Columbia Capital partner told the publication the firm had “loved this opportunity and this market 6-plus years ago,” which places its interest at about the time the company began.

Cologix grew by buying positions in carrier hotels in cities outside the biggest hubs. Its acquisition list includes six Montréal sites from Canix and two Minneapolis sites from The Minnesota Gateway in 2012; two Columbus, Ohio, data centres from Colo-S and DataCenter.BZ in 2014; and sites in Lakeland, Florida, and northern New Jersey from NetAccess in 2015. English Wikipedia describes the resulting downtown positions: 151 Front Street in Toronto, the Harbour Centre in Vancouver, the 511 Building in Minneapolis, 421 West Church Street in Jacksonville and 1250 René-Lévesque West in Montréal, with links to local internet exchanges such as TORIX, VANIX and QIX. In Minneapolis, Wikipedia says, Cologix gives the Midwest Internet Cooperative Exchange space and power in the 511 Building, and in Vancouver it contributes space and fibre connections to VANIX.

Stonepeak, then a continuation vehicle.

In February 2017 Data Center Frontier reported that Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners, a private investment firm founded in 2011 whose portfolio had centred on energy and wireless infrastructure, was acquiring Cologix — Stonepeak’s first data-centre investment, the report said. Cologix then ran 24 data centres across nine markets in the United States and Canada and had 1,600 customers. Van Rooyen stayed as chief executive and chairman, and the existing investors kept what was described as a “material interest.” Stonepeak says its initial investment was made in March 2017 and that it took a majority interest.

Bill Fathers, a Stonepeak senior operating partner who joined the Cologix board in 2017, later became chairman and chief executive. In December 2021 Stonepeak said its second infrastructure fund had partnered with Mubadala Investment Company for growth capital in January 2020, and announced a recapitalisation: the fund and its co-investors would sell Cologix to Stonepeak-managed vehicles combining investors who chose to reinvest with new third-party investors. Stonepeak announced the closing on 4 April 2022 and described the deal as the largest single-asset continuation vehicle raised in digital infrastructure to that date. Cologix then reported more than 40 data centres in 11 markets.

Acquisitions continued under the new structure. The company lists Montréal sites from COLO-D in 2018; Montréal and Toronto sites from MetroOptic in 2019; Dallas, Minneapolis and Silicon Valley sites from vXchnge in 2020 and 2021; VAN4 from Zayo in 2022; VAN5 and MTL12 from Cyxtera in 2023; and two Des Moines, Iowa, sites from Connect Des Moines in 2024. Larger campus buildings are marketed under the name Scalelogix, which the company calls hyperscale edge data centres, alongside its downtown interconnection hubs.

How data-centre operators present themselves.

Data-centre operators sell something most of their customers never see in person: buildings full of power, cooling and racks, usually in business parks on the edge of a city. Their websites and reports therefore do much of the work of explaining what they own and where it is. In this guide’s set, the companies present themselves through a small number of recurring formats rather than a consumer product.

The first is the campus itself. Operators publish aerial photographs and architectural renderings of their sites, often before a building is finished, together with galleries and short videos. These images are the company’s own material and show the buildings as the operator wants them seen; a rendering of a planned campus is a plan, not a finished site.

The second is the map and the number. Location pages are organised by city or region, and some show a stylised map of how sites relate to one another, sometimes marked as not to scale. Capacity is given in megawatts and floor area in square metres, alongside counts of sites in operation and under construction. Founding years, listing dates and lists of markets often appear as a strip of figures on a home page.

The third is the technical and corporate layer. Interconnection pages describe, in plain terms, how customers can reach telecoms carriers and public clouds from inside a building, often called cloud on-ramps. Sustainability pages and annual environmental, social and governance reports set out the company’s stated targets, and investor pages carry results, filings and presentations. For a designer, these formats show how a business with few visible products builds an identity from places, figures and documents.

Calgary, Ashburn and a Montréal campus.

On 12 October 2022 the Cologix board appointed Laura Ortman, co-president and chief revenue officer since 2018, as chief executive, the company said; Fathers remained chairman, and the company named Stonepeak as its controlling shareholder. Stonepeak still lists Cologix in its portfolio, with Denver as headquarters.

The footprint has kept widening. On 22 October 2025 Cologix announced it had acquired DataHiveOne, which it called Calgary’s primary carrier hotel, along with most of DataHive’s colocation and interconnection assets — its entry to the Calgary market. It said its Canadian business then comprised 22 data centres across Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver. On 5 February 2026 it announced the purchase of 38 acres in Ashburn, Virginia, with preliminary planning expected to begin around 2030; the company said the site would start with 85 megawatts of power and could grow beyond 300 megawatts over time. It described the land as lying in the heart of what is often called “Data Center Alley,” and said it had been part of the Loudoun County community for nearly a decade. In March 2026 the investment group La Caisse agreed senior debt financing for Cologix’s MTL8 data centre at Technoparc Montréal, which the two companies said would deliver 21 megawatts and connect with Cologix’s 11 other Montréal facilities. La Caisse said its partnership with Cologix began in 2021 and called the financing its third investment in the company. The company now describes more than 45 data centres across 13 North American markets and about 2,000 customers.

Its site names follow one system: a three-letter city code and a number, from DAL1 and JAX2 to MTL12, TOR5 and CGY1, as the company’s own data-centre list shows.

For a design guide, Cologix shows how a plain naming code can hold together dozens of buildings bought from many earlier owners. Compare Flexential, another North American operator built from regional companies, and Equinix, whose business also centres on interconnection. For this guide we use a deep blue, a cool grey and a copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cologix’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.