CPP Investments has entered a joint venture with Pacific Asset Management Company (Pacific AMC) to undertake a KRW1trn (€680m) joint venture to develop carrier-neutral hyperscale data centres in South Korea.
CPP Investments has committed KRW276bn to the joint venture’s initial seed project to be developed in metropolitan Seoul.
This is the second data centre joint venture between CPP Investments and Pacific AMC. The first joint venture was set up in 2022 to develop the Jukjeon Data Centre, located in the eastern part of the Seoul metropolitan area.
“Demand for data centres in Asia Pacific has been on the rise, driven by the continued need for cloud computing and the increasing global adoption of artificial intelligence,” said Max Biagosch, senior managing director, global head of real assets & head of Europe for CPP Investments.
“In South Korea, businesses continue to seek high-quality digital infrastructure to support the country’s emergence as a digital technology hub,” he said.
Biagosch said the new venture represented another milestone in the plan’s broader data centre strategy globally and expanded a “valued partnership” with Pacific AMC which had led to additional opportunities in the sector to the benefit of CPP contributors and beneficiaries.
In September, the Canadian investor partnered with Blackstone to buy the Sydney-based AirTrunk, a pan Asian data centre platform, from Macquarie Asset Management and PSP Investments for A$24bn. The partners are awaiting the approval of Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), believed to be imminent, to close the transaction.
CPP Investments made its first direct data centre investment in 2017 and has since established data centre joint ventures and investments in major hubs across the Asia Pacific region, as well as in the US and Canada.
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