AirTrunk’s initial offers due to land

AirTrunk It has the best-in-class hyperscale data centre platforms for large cloud content and enterprise customers across the Asia-Pacific.

First round bids are set to be lobbed for AirTrunk on Friday, providing more insight into what parties are the dominant contenders for the $5bn data centre owner.

So far, it’s expected to be a shootout between the Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank-advised Blackstone, and the Digital Bridge and IFM consortium, advised by Barrenjoey.

GIP is also expected to bid and may join with Digital Bridge as a bidding partner in a contest for all of the business or at least half.

Sources believe other Australian funds will also join the Digital Bridge consortium to offer more financial fire power.

But at this stage, other names around the hoop are considered to be tyre kickers.

Overseeing the process are Goldman Sachs and Macquarie Capital, and parties have been running the ruler over the business in the data room.

Along with Macquarie Group, the other owner of AirTrunk is PSP along with the founder, ex-Next DC executive Robin Khuda.

AirTrunk has over 1.4 gigawatts of announced data centre capacity across 11 sites and a pipeline for further capacity.

It is considered the best-in-class hyperscale data centre platforms for large cloud content and enterprise customers across the Asia-Pacific, launching its first hyperscale data centre in western Sydney.

It operates in Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore.