Some of the biggest stories that broke this week involved data centre operators and investors looking to sell stakes in their assets. Other highlights included a major signal that Japan’s wireless infrastructure-sharing industry is finally ready to take off, a partnership between Microsoft and Telstra on AI and EQT potentially blowing open a whole new digital infrastructure asset class.

The BIG Story: DigitalBridge makes offer to take Japanese towerco JTower private

DigitalBridge’s interest in Japan’s wireless infrastructure came just days after Macquarie agreed a deal to enter the market, and a KKR announcement is anticipated soon.

Japanese MNO’s have traditionally been reluctant to share passive infrastructure such as towers, and other forms of mobile assets, but diminishing revenues and increasing costs from their networks are forcing their hands.

JTower said in a statement that it needed upfront capital to deploy infrastructure that would generate long-term returns, but the shorter-term focus of public equity investors meant it was struggling to secure the funds it needed.

With the backing of DigitalBridge, if the deal is approved by shareholders, a perfect storm of supply and demand could supercharge the Japanese market to become one of the largest in Asia, if not the world.

Data centre sales coming thick and fast

This week started with reports that Filipino operator PLDT was in negotiations with CVC Capital Partners over the sale of a minority stake in its data centre business (VITRO) after talks with NTT were scrapped.

Later in the week, PLDT confirmed discussions with “an investor” were in “the final stages” and revealed some details about what the future holds for VITRO.

Brookfield too was reported to be considering a divestment of a minority stake in its US$3.8bn French data centre opeartor, Data4.

InfraVia Capital Partners was also said to be considering a sale, this time across the border from France in Switzerland. InfraVia acquired data centre enterprise Green from Altice in 2018 for a sum that represented an enterprise value of US$248 million. Reports this week said Green’s value was more in the USS$1.1 billion range.

New facilities are on their way

While the towering presence of hyperscale data centres continues to dominate industry headlines, The Tech Capital covered investment trends in the edge space, pointing to a few recent examples.

We also covered AWS’s plans to expand in Hyderabad following talks with Indian ministers, and the latest on the US$11 billion campus it is building in Indiana.

ASX listed NEXTDC opened a US$50m Darwin data centre and Open Access Data Centres opened a 2MW site in the DRC.

In terms of planned expansions, Moscow’s Kaspersky revealed plans to establish a data centre stronghold in China, Equinix said it would build its sixth data centre in Hong Kong, which comes with an initial US$124 million price tag and Edged Energy wants to open its data centre facility in New Albany, Ohio by July 2025.

Investor Thor Equities expanded its data centre footprint with a 270-acre acquisition in LaGrange, Georgia and AI infrastructure firm CoreWeave is to add 200MW of additional power to its operations following an extension of its HPC hosting contract with Core Scientific

In the UK, Yondr announced plans to transform a former London paint factory into a data centre as part of 100MW hyperscale development. But interestingly, data revealed this week by Synergy Research Group showed that despite being a top three market globally in terms of data centre energy consumption, it does not make the top 20 for global hyperscale data centre capacity.

Big moves in fibre

In addition to the groundbreaking deal between Microsoft and Telstra regarding the latter’s intercity fibre network, we also exclusively reported this week that Indonesian towercos Mitratel and Protelindo are both considering buying a stake in IOH’s fibre network.

Fibre companies on both sides of the Atlantic made changes to their management teams this week. euNetworks CEO Paula Cogan announced her retirement and former CMO Kevin Dean was appointed as interim boss until a replacement can be found.

US fibreco Lighpath hired a new CFO. Rachel Stacks’ appointment marks the sixth ex-Zayo employee to join Lightpath’s leadership team.

The big picture

Our financial markets coverage this week featured an exclusive interview with Nick Del Deo, a managing director and equity analyst at Moffet Nathanson. We chatted with Nick about the impact of rate cuts on tower and data centre stocks, how 5G rollout and spectrum allocation were affecting tower performance and how taking a different approach to AI could diversify and reduce risk on your data centre picks.

On that note, we also listed 10 data centre operators to watch as investors look to capitalise on the booming data centre market,

We also looked at data that showed on-premise data centres face a decline as hyperscalers are projected to capture over 60% of capacity by 2029 and that 20 markets alone command 62% of global hyperscale data centre capacity

To round off this week, why not take a look at a breakdown of the multifaceted architecture of Edge IT in a US$317bn market – from sensors to data centres.

That’s all for this week, stay tuned as we bring you more updates from across the world of digital infrastructure financing next week and for the year ahead!