AirTrunk's hefty sale
The expected sale of Australian data centre operator AirTrunk to Blackstone for a substantial $20 billion is recognition of the company's potential as AI continues to boom.
From its very inception in 2016, AirTrunk was always about going big. It has targeted tech industry whales by exclusively building massive data centres, not bothering with selling server racks to minnow enterprises and government bureaus.
It’s a bet that has paid off on an appropriately grand scale: AirTrunk is poised to sell for $20 billion this week to New York investment giant Blackstone, as first reported by Bloomberg. That would be by far the biggest acquisition of an Australian company this year, valuing AirTrunk at more than double that of NextDC or Canberra Data Centres.
AirTrunk has 11 facilities, fewer than either NextDC or CDC. But its centres are spread across the APAC region, including Japan, Hong Kong and Malaysia, and are all built large enough to be attractive to the likes of Microsoft and Google.
AirTrunk pulled the trigger on a sale at a favourable time. Investors remain confident that an AI revolution is upon us. After the companies that develop AI models (Meta, Alphabet) and the one that creates the chips that enable that development (Nvidia), the next big beneficiary of that revolution may well be the data centres whose compute power is needed to deploy and develop AI. NextDC, for example, has more than doubled its stock since ChatGPT’s launch.
