This week’s digital infrastructure news came thick and fast. As the end of the year approaches, there is no sign that the industry is slowing down just yet, if anything it seems like things are picking up speed! This week we covered stories spanning M&A, subsea cable developments, numerous data centre openings and deep-dove into some novel topics, including the worlds first GPU bond.

The big story: Digital Bridge could be acquired if latest fundraise goes poorly, says investor

Mutual fund asset manager Ave Maria has released a Q3 investor letter in which it addressed digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge’s (NYSE: DBRG) stock price and operational performance.

Digital Bridge stock represents 11.6% of The Ave Maria Focused Fund, which failed to outperform the S&P 500 Index in the three months prior to September 30^th 2024.

In the letter, Ave Maria said “the operational performance of the Fund’s holdings throughout 2024 has been strong,” but “unfortunately, the stock price performance of some of the holdings has not reflected their strong operating performance”.

DigitalBridge’s share price has dropped by more than 25% since the beginning of the year. The investment manager is currently trading at US$13.10 per share and has a US$2.4 billion market capitalisation.

“DigitalBridge is currently raising their third flagship digital infrastructure fund. If the raise is successful, DigitalBridge’s stock price should prove to be quite cheap at current levels,” Ave Maria’s investor note said.

“If the raise is unsuccessful, DigitalBridge will likely be bought by a larger competitor,” it added. Read more here.

Asia Pacific

Following The Tech Capital’s APAC Finance Forum in Jakarta last month, we covered two of the major talking points from the show this week. Firstly PGIM’s data centre lead revealed details of its pivot towards Emerging Markets, and Google’s energy lead for APAC had some thoughts on AI’s role in solving climate change.

In other data centre news, an $860m data centre backed by a hydrogen plant and battery storage is planned for South Korea, Brookfield’s DCI unveiled a US$50 million data centre in South Australia and VNET Group and Dajia insurance subsidiary formed a data centre pre-REIT fund in China.

EdgeConneX expanded its Jakarta data centre campus to over 200 MW capacity while NTT DATA revealed plans to build a 300MW data centre campus in Malaysia.

Finally, BDx Indonesia unveils AI data centre park in Indonesia

We saw two PPA’s signed in APAC this week, with Equinix agreeing a deal to secure 58.5MW of solar power from Sembcorp, and we exclusively spoke with Evolution Data Centres CEO Darren Webb about a 100MW deal he struck in the Philippines.

Turning to M&A we saw Hong Kong-listed ESR Group receive a US$7bn privatisation offer.

Elsewhere, Chorus and DataGrid are plotting New Zealand to Australia cable routes and Nvidia, Siam.AI are partners for a Thai sovereign cloud.

Africa and Middle East

The Middle East market is undoubtedly heating up when it comes to data centre announcements and projects. Specifically, this is the case in Saudi Arabia, where we learnt about a fresh $13bn data centre project in NEOM’s Oxagon.

Microsoft completed the construction of its Saudi Arabian data centre region and across the border in Kuwait IHS Towers sold its tower portfolio to Zain Group.

Iran is set to launch its first GPU data centre and attempt to develop domestic chip manufacturing industry, while in Africa Raxio Group shifted gears in leadership with a new CEO appointment.

Continuing our Africa coverage we invited Thomas Switala, Managing Partner, Switala Ventures to write us an opinion piece on Cross-border and terrestrial connectivity: The arteries Africa needs to keep data flowing.

Europe

In another quiet week for Europe, we didn’t have much to report in terms of company announcements, except for this story about InfraRed Capital Partners spending US$114m on Proximus Luxembourg Infrastructure.

But we did explore the French political turmoil and its implications for digital infrastructure.

Another major story we covered this week was the launch of the world’s first GPU bond, from investment manager NuWay Capital.

Americas

Most of our Americas coverage tends to be focused on the US market. But this week a major story came from across the northern border in Canada. Alberta is pushing for US$100 billion of AI data centre investments by 2030, we found out, and explored an RBC report looking at what this might mean.

Back in the states, Cologix is planning a US$7bn investment in an Ohio data centre campus, but that wasn’t the largest announcement of the week.

That accolade belongs to Facebook parent, Meta, which plans to invest $10bn in Louisiana AI data centre. We also looked at Zuch’s plans for nuclear energy and explored an RFP it has launched.

In other household-name tech news, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger retired amid his turnaround plan, and Elon Musk took his battle to stop OpenAI going for-profit to the courts.

Elsewhere, Equinix attracted a major investment from a Canadian Pension Fund, analysts are divided on Digital Realty Trust’s outlook as institutional investors reshuffle holdings and Infra AI giant Nebius Group secured $700 million in private placement financing.

365 Data Centers also secured refinancing for growth and infrastructure upgrades, and Veeam Software secured a US$2bn investment, valuing it at US$15bn.

Appointments wise Vantage Data Centers bulked up its financial leadership ahead of 2025 growth push.

Rounding out our US coverage Northern Data are to build a 120MW data centre in Georgia.

But turning to South America, the Brazilian firm behind Elea Data Centers has launched a US$200m fund for data centre investments, and DigitalBridge’s Highline bagged $380m to boost Brazil’s mobile tower growth.