Blackstone and CPP Investments to Buy AirTrunk Data Centre

Four funds managed by Blackstone, world’s largest alternative asset manager, along with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) on Wednesday said that they have entered into an agreement to acquire AirTrunk, the leading Asia Pacific data centre platform, from Macquarie Asset Management and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, for an implied enterprise value of over $16.1 billion.

The acquisition by Blackstone’s four funds – Blackstone Real Estate Partners, Blackstone Infrastructure Partners, Blackstone Tactical Opportunities, and Blackstone’s private equity strategy for individual investors along with CPP Investments- represents Blackstone’s largest investment in the Asia Pacific region.

The transaction is subject to approval from the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board, Blackstone said.

AirTrunk has a sizeable presence in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It has more than 800 MW of capacity committed to customers and owns land that can support over 1 GW of future growth across the region.

Blackstone is capitalising on this movement as a leading investor globally in data centers. Blackstone has invested in both the debt and equity of other data centre companies, including as owner of QTS, the fastest growing data centre 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, such as Invenergy, the largest independent renewables developer in the US.

To Lead Digital Infrastructure

Jon Gray, President and Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone, said that acquiring AirTrunk is another vital step as Blackstone seeks to be the leading digital infrastructure investor in the world across the ecosystem, including data centres, power and related services, he said.

Sean Klimczak, Global Head of Blackstone Infrastructure and Nadeem Meghji, Global Co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate, said that digital infrastructure is experiencing unprecedented demand driven by the AI revolution as well as the broader digitization of the economy.

He added: “Prior to AirTrunk, Blackstone’s portfolio consisted of $55 billion of data centres including facilities under construction, along with over $70 billion in prospective pipeline development. We look forward to partnering with the outstanding AirTrunk management team to further accelerate its growth.”

AirTrunk’s founder and CEO Robin Khuda said that this transaction evidences the strength of the AirTrunk platform in a strong performing sector as they 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,” he said.

It is expected that there will be approximately US$1 trillion of capital expenditures in the US over the next five years to build and facilitate new data centres, with another $1 trillion capital expenditures outside the US.