Morgan Stanley Investment Management Infrastructure Partners has gone to exclusivity on an agreement to partner with Altice France to establish the first nationwide independent distributed colocation provider of data centres in France through the acquisition of a majority interest in UltraEdge, subject to regulatory approval.
With plenty of examples of sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, real estate platforms among others also investing in digital infrastructure, the lines have been getting blurred in the Real Assets world.
This time, it is an infrastructure fund stepping in to make a deal, taking a 70% stake in UltraEdge and its portfolio of 257 data centres interconnected via a countrywide fibre network which will be carved out through a demerger of the data centre operations of Altice France’s parent company, SFR.
The passive infrastructure and equipment of the data centres will be transferred to UltraEdge with servers and active equipment retained at SFR.
Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure fund will work with Altice France to continue upgrading the infrastructure and increasing the density of the portfolio. The deal values Ultra Edge at around €764 mln. Law firm White & Case advised Morgan Stanley.
Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners has around $16 bn (€14.7 bn) of AUM.
