In 2002, while the internet industry was burying its dead, Osama Arafat bought a corpse.
Exodus Communications had gone bankrupt, and its giant Brampton data centre, about 160,000 square feet, was up for sale. Q9 Networks, the Toronto hosting company Arafat had started two years earlier with Paul Sharpe, agreed to take it. Arafat said the deal let Q9 meet demand much faster than if it had built a second site itself.
Over the next decade Q9 built out sites in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, ending up with 11 data centres.
The bet looks sharper once you remember the timing. Q9 launched in May 2000, within weeks of the market peak. Its first data centre opened in September of that year in downtown Toronto, near Bay Street. That address mattered. Banks and financial firms wanted their servers close, and Q9 sold them the idea that a data centre could be an outsourced utility, not a back-room closet.
He and Sharpe kept the company small in story and large in steel. Over the next decade Q9 built out sites in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, ending up with 11 data centres.
The 2010 announcement of a C$125m, 240,000 square foot facility beside the Brampton sites created what was then Canada's largest commercial data centre campus. It also created risk, because every building had to be filled with customers before the debt came due.
The corporate story was not smooth either. In 2008, ABRY Partners agreed to buy Q9 for C$361m, and that buyout did not go through. Four years later, an investor group including Bell and Ontario Teachers' agreed to buy the whole company for C$1.1bn, with Arafat and Sharpe expected to keep running it as a stand-alone business from Toronto.
The price tag, three times the failed offer, is the real reveal. Q9 never pitched itself as a technology breakthrough. It was patient capacity, built where customers worked and bought when sellers were desperate.
For a first-time founder, the lesson is unglamorous. If you can survive the year everyone else is leaving, the empty buildings left behind are the cheapest growth you will ever buy.