Sydney-based Goodman Group will launch a European data centre partnership in this half of the year to develop facilities in European capital cities with 425MW capacity.
The global logistics giant is in negotiations with leading European institutions which have invested with the group for more than two decades to participate in the vehicle.
Addressing analysts to announce the company’s full-year operating profit of A$2.3 billion (€1.3bn), Goodman Group’s group chief executive officer, Greg Goodman, said the facilities would be developed in prime locations in metropolitan areas of key European cities.
“These will be low latency, cloud orientated facilities which are in good demand,” he said. The group owns sites in major cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London and Paris.
Goodman said: “We are on target to have 0.5GW of data centre development underway in key global cities by June 2026. A development programme of this scope is ideally suited to the capital partnering model we’ve successfully employed at Goodman for years.
“We are already moving those developments along, and some are effectively starting to come out of the ground with all the groundworks, the transformers and things that you require to keep moving forward,”said Goodman.
“You need to be able to take the risk, which means you need the money. So when I said customers and capital, it’s capital and customers in that order. You need both. Otherwise, you can’t play in those market where the barrier to entry is becoming getting bigger,” he added.
Goodman Group, which has a current book of work in progress valued at A$13bn, of which 57% are data centres, had originally planned to launch a large global data centre fund.
But Goodman explained the decision to go regional was made out of expediency and “what makes sense, and doable today”.
“Obviously we have a significant bank of opportunity and we don’t need to complicate it with any other parts of the world,” he said, explaining the rationale for the European platform. Investors preferred to work geographically in regard to Europe, he added.
Similarly, some capital will be allocated in Japan which he described as “a very, very, very strong market”.
“We have got more than a gigawatt of opportunities in Japan. At the end of the day, we are looking at a A$30bn-plus ticket there. They’re big data centres and they need to be well funded.”
He said the group continued to rotate capital and assets, with significant data centre partnership activity throughout the year, including the sale of a completed data centre into the Goodman Japan Data Centre Partnership.
Goodman Group recently launched its Hong Kong data centre unlisted find and had raised A$4.1bn to strengthen its own balance sheet and to its data centre projects.
He said: “The UK would follow. It will have its own separate partnership because the capital and the opportunity there is also extensive.”
The plan is to launch the UK partnership in the next financial year. The group is also planning to launch a new separate data centre partnership for Australia and the US.
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