The funds managed by Blackstone Real Estate Partners, Blackstone Infrastructure Partners, Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, and Blackstone’s private equity strategy for individual investors, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire AirTrunk, the leading Asia Pacific data center platform, from Macquarie Asset Management and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, for an implied enterprise value of over A$24 billion.
This represents Blackstone’s largest investment in the Asia Pacific region. The deal is subject to approval from the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board.
AirTrunk is the largest data center platform in the Asia Pacific region, with a major presence in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. And it has over 800MW of capacity committed to customers and owns land that can support over 1GW of future growth across the region.
Blackstone has invested in the debt and equity of other data center companies, such as as the owner of QTS (the fastest growing data center company in the world), Coreweave, and Digital Realty. Blackstone is also focused on addressing the sector’s power needs in many differentiated ways, including as an investor in power and utility companies like Invenergy (the largest independent renewables developer in the US).
KEY QUOTES:
“This is Blackstone at its best – leveraging our global platform to capitalize on our highest conviction theme. AirTrunk is another vital step as Blackstone seeks to be the leading digital infrastructure investor in the world across the ecosystem, including data centers, power and related services.”
– Jon Gray, President and Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone
“Digital infrastructure is experiencing unprecedented demand driven by the AI revolution as well as the broader digitization of the economy. Prior to AirTrunk, Blackstone’s portfolio consisted of US$55 billion of data centers including facilities under construction, along with over US$70 billion in prospective pipeline development. We look forward to partnering with the outstanding AirTrunk management team to further accelerate its growth.”
– Sean Klimczak, Global Head of Blackstone Infrastructure and Nadeem Meghji, Global Co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate
“This transaction evidences the strength of the AirTrunk platform in a strong performing sector as we capture the next wave of growth from cloud services and AI and support the energy transition in Asia Pacific. We look forward to working with Blackstone and CPP Investments and benefitting from their scale capital, sector expertise and valuable network across the various local markets, which will help support the continued expansion of AirTrunk.”
– Robin Khuda, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AirTrunk
