Macquarie buys Asia data center player Airtrunk

MIRA is investing via Macquarie Asia Infrastructure Fund 2, which closed at $3.3 billion in 2018. At the time, the fund had already committed $1.7 billion across India, the Philippines, Singapore, and China. 

The consortium, which includes other MIRA-managed entities, is acquiring its position from Sixth Street Partners and Goldman Sachs. Sixth Street, formerly known as TSSP, is a credit and special situations platform that agreed to separate from its parent TPG Capital earlier this year. Goldman Sachs and Sixth Street have invested around $1 billion in AirTrunk since 2017, including a $330 million round last year aimed at building out operations in Singapore.

AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda, will also sell down shares to the consortium, although he will continue to hold a material stake in the business and retain his role as CEO. He described the investment as a way of helping the company expand into new markets and leverage MIRA’s infrastructure experience across the region. MIRA has previously invested in data centers, fiber assets and telecom tower businesses across Asia, Europe, and North America.

Australia-based AirTrunk develops and operates data center campuses with an emphasis on designs and construction methodologies that promote energy efficiency and scalability in computing capacity. The company positions itself as the dominant player in Asia’s hyperscale market, a subset of the data center space focused on maintaining the flexibility to increase capacity as demand rises. It has five data centers under development across Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. 

“The global data center industry has grown significantly in recent years, driven by an exponential increase in data consumption, increasing cloud applications, and the shift from internal IT infrastructure to outsourced resources,” Frank Kwok, head of MIRA Asia Pacific, said in a statement. “In the Asia Pacific, this thematic is amplified by the region’s emerging economies and growing populations, leading to increasing data usage and a greater need for in-country computing workloads and storage.”

Asia is expected to become the largest data center market globally in the near term, with developing economies experiencing rapid digitization driving most of the growth. This has precipitated rising private equity interest, with recent activity including buy-and-build plans from the likes of Warburg Pincus and Bain Capital. The trend is seen as part of the growing demand for data infrastructure driven by artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and the internet-of-things. 

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Buyouts
• Infrastructure
• Australia
• Macquarie Group
• data center
• Goldman Sachs
• TPG Capital