It’s the final countdown with private equity giant Blackstone the frontrunner in the $20bn sale of data centre giant AirTrunk amid speculation a deal could be signed this week.
The Macquarie Group-owned data centre has been in focus for bankers the past few weeks, but Blackstone and its partner, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, are understood to have emerged as favourite for the buyout.
It is understood a total of five firms had been in the running, with final offers closing on Tuesday last week.
Blackstone’s main rival in the bidding war was an IFM-led consortium that included DigitalBridge, Silver Lake, GIP and Mubadala’s MGX.
AirTrunk was founded by Robin Khuda, a former executive at local data centre developer NextDC, in 2015.
While NextDC has a major hold over the Australian data centre market and is increasingly pushing into Asia, AirTrunk has forged the opposite path, scaling into Asia first, where two-thirds of its data centres are located.
Last month it doubled down on that push, opening a Malaysian hyperscale data centre in Johor Bahru, known as JHB1. The company has 11 data centres in total, three of which are in Hong Kong, two are in Tokyo, one is in Singapore, one in Melbourne and three are in Sydney.
The data centre market has been a hot topic for investors for several years and is increasing in value as more companies eye AI-powered products that require extra computing power.
Land supply issues and construction blowout times are also having an impact. In cities including Singapore and Hong Kong, the lack of land for development has been pushing operators into areas including Malaysia and Indonesia.
NextDC’s Asian push recently included expansion into Thailand, where it is understood to be investing 13.76 billion baht ($600m) in a data centre project.
Macquarie and PSP Investments are understood to own an 88 per cent stake in the AirTrunk business.
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