Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC has launched a $1 bn (€890 mln) joint venture to build and acquire six large data centres in Europe.
US-based Equinix, the global interconnection and data centre company, is partnering with GIC for the fund, entitled The Venture. GIC is to invest around €712 mln in the venture.
The fund will purchase two operational data centres in London and Paris, which will deliver approximately 31 megawatts (MW) of power. In addition, data centres will be developed in Amsterdam and London, with two sites in Frankfurt.
When fully developed, the six facilities will provide approximately 155 MW of power capacity. Equinix will develop, operate, and manage the data centres.
Lee Kok Sun, chief investment officer, GIC Real Estate, said: ‘As a long-term value investor, we are confident that the strong growth in data consumption and public cloud data storage will continue to drive secular demand for hyper-scale data centres.
‘We believe the venture portfolio, which is well-located in the primary European data centre hubs and under the management of an established partner such as Equinix, will generate steady and resilient returns in the long run. We look forward to expanding our global partnerships and exploring further opportunities in this fast-growing sector worldwide.’
Charles Meyers, president and CEO of Equinix, said: ‘It has been a long journey to reach this point, but we are tremendously excited to announce the formation of our first xScale data centers joint venture.
‘Partnering with a world-class investment firm like GIC will provide the opportunity to make significant capital investments in order to capture targeted large footprint deployments while continuing to optimise our capital structure.
‘The JV structure will enable us to extend our cloud leadership while providing significant value to a critical set of hyperscale customers. We look forward to launching similar JVs in other operating regions and believe that these efforts will continue to further differentiate Equinix as the trusted center of a cloud-first world.’
