Dealmaking king David Di Pilla is looking to ride the tailwinds of the AI and cloud-computing boom, unveiling plans to build a data centre portfolio over the next couple of years that could rival that of $24 billion market darling AirTrunk.

The big push into data centres and digital infrastructure was revealed by Mr Di Pilla as his HMC Capital secured Global Switch Australia, a $2 billion data centre campus on the fringe of the Sydney CBD (a deal first reported by The Australian Financial Review’s Street Talk column) and launched a $300 million institutional raising to underwrite the acquisition.