In the data centre world this week we saw the biggest transaction ever recorded as Blackstone acquired Australia’s AirTrunk for an enormous US$16 billion deal, as well as developments in two US wireless carriers’ fibre strategies. Other noteworthy headlines included worrying data around data centre carbon emissions released by Morgan Stanley and we dove into one of the technologies that hopes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – Small Modular Reactions.

The Big Story: Blackstone buys AirTrunk in monumental $16bn deal, the largest ever in data centres

The Blackstone Group (NYSE: BX) has acquired AirTrunk for A$24 billion (US$16 billion) making it the largest single flagship purchase in the data centre sector globally to date.

To date, only four transactions had gone above the US$10 billion mark including KKR-GIP’s US$15 billion takeover of CyrusOne in 2021, DigitalBridge-IFM’s US$11 billion acquisition of Switch in 2022, American Tower’s purchase of Coresite for US$10.1 billion in 2021, and Blackstone’s acquisition of QTS Data Centers US$10 billion in 2021

With this in mind, we rounded up the top 10 largest data centre acquisitions by value, which represented $91bn in invested capital.

The transaction, along with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), overshadows Blackstone’s A$8.9 billion takeover of Australian casino operator Crown Resorts in 2022, and becomes the firm’s largest ever in the Asia Pacific region, the alternative assets manager said on Wednesday.

Macquarie Asset Management, holding 44% of the business, is poised to receive a windfall. Their initial A$3 billion investment will skyrocket to an estimated A$23.5 billion payout.

Europe

Over in Europe, Blackstone continued its march to becoming the pre-eminent global data centre investor, as its QTS business filed planning permission to build a 1.1GW data centre campus on the former Britishvolt site Blackstone bought in Northumberland earlier this year.

Denmark’s data centre market received a significant boost, as both Penta Infra and atNorth, announced a combined 270MW investment in two seperate campuses and Switzerland’s Partner’s Group invested US$1.9 billion in its portfolio company, EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure.

Across the continent, data from Knight Frank showed the the fragmented state of Europe’s data centre markets, with new development pipelines and take up in the first half of 2024 varying wildly across FLAP-D markets, and Madrid showing that it is becoming a notable player in the regions scene.

In an exclusive interview, we also spoke to EcoDataCenter CEO Peter Michelson, who shared some fascinating insights about why CoreWeave chose EcoDataCenter for the first Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU deployment in Europe.

On the fibre side, UK telco Virgin Media O2 is seeking to amass £1 billion (US$1.31 billion) through the divestment of a minority stake in its $US7 billion fibre broadband network unit.

Americas

While VMO2 is selling fibre, Verizon are very much buying it, even if the decision hasn’t gone down well with all industry observers.

Moffett Nathanson analysts Craig Moffett and Nick Del Deo slammed its decision to acquire Frontier for $US20 billion as atrocious and awful. Find out why here.

While Verizon were busy sorting out their deal, major rival AT&T announced a deal with Nokia to continue the buildout of its own network. In light of the news we ask, is Nokia’s fibre bet starting to pay off?

Elsewhere across the US, Digital Realty appointed a former Equinix exec as SVP of global channels,  Nvidia are among investors snapping up $160 million in data centre operator Applied Digital and  Equinix’s green bond issuance surpassed $5.6bn, meaning the REIT is now a Top 10 US corporate issuer.

Morgan Stanley warned that the AI-fuelled data centre boom to push global CO2e to 2.5B metric tons by 2030, but George Borovas, a partner at the law firm at the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP spoke to us about one technology that promises to clean up the industry’s act.

In an in-depth interview, Borovas explores the barriers to data centres adopting nuclear power, how the industry can overcome them, and why small Modular Reactors for data centres are missing a middleman.

Meanwhile, Apple and Nvidia are ‘working on an investment’ in OpenAI as the company is set to surpass $100bn in value. We covered data that US colocation vacancy rates are plummetting as data centre demand outpaces supply, and also looked at Intel’s Q2, which its CEO said was disappointing as Morgan Stanley prepares to carve up the struggling chip maker.

Middle East and Africa

The big story coming out the Middle East this week saw Egypt’s minister of communications and information technology, Amr Talaat outline plans for data centre investment at the second Indonesia-Africa Forum (IAF) held in Badung, Bali.

Talaat emphasises that Egypt is keen on establishing a collaborative partnership with Indonesia to enhance both nations’ digital infrastructure capabilities and collaborate on submarine cables to improve connectivity services in Egypt. The Egyptian government offered Indonesian companies the opportunity to invest in various sectors, including data centres and digitalisation.

Further details on the investment agreement and project timelines are expected to be released as discussions progress.

Asia Pacific

Aside from the monumental Airtrunk deal, other news from Asia Pacific this week included the eruption of a bidding war as global investors KKR and Bain targetted Japanese tech firm Fuji Soft, Yondr announced it is targetting a $500m private debt facility for Malaysian data centre expansion and Empyrion Digital entered the Japanese market with a hyperscale data centre investment.

Finally, Chinese data centre operator Vnet released its Q2 results and said it expects $1.1bn in 2024 sales.

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! In the meantime, do check our APAC Finance Forum’s website as we gear up for another exec-packed edition. Submissions for the APAC Awards are also open until September 20.