London data centre business Kao Data, which is backed by Legal & General and Goldacre, has welcomed a new shareholder in the shape of New Zealand's Infratil.
The Wellington-based data, transport and renewables investor has acquired a 40% stake in Kao with a £120-130 mln (€140-150 mln) commitment, joining with L&G and Goldacre, both of which hold a 30% share in the firm.
Goldacre, the founder of Kao, is part of the Noé Group, a family run investment and asset management business.
The firm's joint stakeholders said they intend to build Kao Data into a £500 mln multi-site data centre platform in the medium term.
Kao owns a 15-acre (6 ha) data centre campus in Harlow, north London, where it has built one data centre, with construction of a second to begin this financial year. Once fully developed, the campus will be home to four energy efficient data centres, all powered by 100% renewable energy.
The Harlow campus is located in the UK Innovation Corridor between London and Cambridge, home to world class academic, technology and bioscience institutions and companies.
Kao’s first data centre houses Nvidia’s Cambridge-1, the most powerful supercomputer in the UK, which provides computing capacity to healthcare companies such as AstraZeneca and GSK.
Kao has also recently signed an agreement to acquire two UK prime location data centres with a long-term anchor lease from a large financial services business. This purchase will enable Kao to deliver multi-site services for its clients and expand potential capacity to 55 MW.
Infratil CEO Jason Boyes said: 'With global demand for connectivity continuing to rise, this is an excellent opportunity to expand our digital infrastructure portfolio and build on our successful data centre platform investment in Australia and New Zealand.
'We were an early mover into this sector, acquiring CDC Data Centres in 2016, which has delivered exceptional performance.'
Vincent Gerritsen, head of UK and Europe for Morrison & Co, the manager of Infratil said: 'We look forward to working with the Kao Data management team and existing shareholders to continue the build out of best-in-class, high-performance, sustainable data centre solutions and scale up the platform through attractive growth opportunities in the pipeline.'
Lee Myall, CEO, Kao Data said: 'I welcome today’s announcement of Infratil Limited’s investment in Kao Data, and on behalf of our management team, we look forward to working with them on the next stages of this exciting journey.
'This investment presents a strategic opportunity to accelerate our mission of supporting the computing requirements of advanced industries, and to do so sustainably.'
