David Di Pilla’s HMC Capital is poised to buy Global Switch Australia for about $2bn as the company prepares to list a data centre real estate investment trust by Christmas.
It comes as an $8.8bn merger between Sigma and pharmacy giant Chemist Warehouse partly orchestrated by Mr Di Pilla, a Sigma shareholder, looks more certain to gain approval from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Building up a data centre business has been a focus for Mr Di Pilla and he has flagged moves to list a new data centre fund.
The understanding is HMC Capital is also the last party standing in the contest to buy the iSeek data centres, with Queensland Investment Corporation walking away.
It is believed while Di Pilla has been comfortable with Amber Infrastructure’s $400m price expectations, his challenge has been raising the funds to pay for a transaction.
The opportunity on the data centre front is to put the iSeek business together with the $1bn Fujitsu data centres in Australia, which are also for sale, and gain synergies.
Demand for data centres, which are needed to power AI, is strong after Blackstone paid $24bn for industry giant Airtrunk.
Global Switch Australia has been up for sale through investment bank UBS and operator
Next DC was not invited into the process.
Parties which had taken a look were Stonepeak, QIC, the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board and Partners Group.
On offer have been two major data centres on the western edge of Sydney’s central business district comprising 73,000 sqm of space, owned by Global Switch.
Tenants the Australian Taxation Office and the Department of Defence have moved or are in the process of moving due to national security concerns linked to the assets being Chinese owned.
DataRoom reported in 2021 Global Switch was working with investment banks Morgan Stanley and UBS for the sale of 49 per cent of the business after the company made efforts in 2019 to launch an initial public offering for the business in Hong Kong.
At that time, the talk was its Australian assets could come up for sale as it explored investment options.
The thinking was they may be best suited to an Australian owner for security purposes.
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