Swiss Life Asset Managers and the real assets investment arm of French energy firm EDF have teamed up to invest $1.2bn (€1.14bn) in US data centre company DataBank.
Swiss Life Asset Managers and EDF Invest have agreed to recapitalise the colocation and interconnection data centre company by acquiring a 27% stake from existing investors.
DataBank has been a portfolio company of DigitalBridge since 2016.
DigitalBridge said it expects its ownership interests in DataBank to be reduced to 15.5% following the recapitalisation, adding that it will receive cash proceeds of $230m, implying a pre-transaction net value of $906m, inclusive of a retained net value of $676m.
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, DataBank has more than 65 data centre assets in over 27 US markets. The company’s primary product is colocation services.
The Swiss Life Asset Managers-led consortium intends to support DataBank’s plan to expand its data centre footprint across the US.
“This recapitalisation allows us to accelerate our expansion efforts and capture the substantial secular growth in edge computing,” said Raul Martynek, DataBank’s CEO.
Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge, said: “The formation of this new permanent capital vehicle allows DigitalBridge shareholders to maintain significant exposure to the next phase of value creation at DataBank alongside our new co-investors while also freeing up significant capital at an attractive valuation to fuel additional digital M&A.”
Gabriel Damiani, executive director at Swiss Life Asset Managers, said due to the ongoing transformation of digital infrastructure networks, the widespread adoption of working from home, the Internet of Things and 5G, the demand for cloud services as well as data storage will increase in the years to come.
“These are strong tailwinds for data centre platforms such as DataBank, presenting numerous growth opportunities both in the metro and mobile edge segment of the market.”
“DataBank is uniquely positioned to address the growth in data demand within growing markets in the US EDF Invest is excited to diversify its portfolio with this new asset class,” said Fanny Grillo, co-head of infrastructure at EDF Invest.
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