When Blackstone closed its AUD $24 billion acquisition of Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) hyperscale data centre specialist, AirTrunk in December, it became one of the largest data centre providers in the world. AirTrunk, led by founder and CEO Robin Khuda had already scaled the company into Asia-Pacific’s largest data centre provider with assets in Australia, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Blackstone however believes there is more growth to be had and wants to grow AirTrunk into an AUD $100 billion business.
“AirTrunk’s runway is enormous. Its leasing pipeline has grown dramatically since early 2024, and it owns developable land that can support over 1 gigawatt (GW) of future growth across the region. We’re helping the company expand its capabilities within existing markets, explore entry into new ones and continue to act as a leader on sustainability,” said Blackstone global co-head of real estate Nadeem Meghji in a recent interview [1].
“As for Blackstone, we’re really just getting started,” he said. “Our portfolio consists of $70 billion of data centres, including facilities under construction, and over $100 billion in our prospective development pipeline. Our goal is to be the world’s largest investor in AI infrastructure, acting as a trusted solutions provider to some of the largest and most valuable companies across the globe.”
“Blackstone’s experience with QTS demonstrated to AirTrunk that we truly understood their industry and could help them scale. Our ability, as one controlling party, to speak for all the capital required to complete the transaction – and to drive future growth – differentiated us from competitors,” said Blackstone global head of infrastructure Sean Klimczak.
Blackstone acquired US and European data center provider QTS in 2021, which was the largest transaction in data centre history at the time at $10 billion. Since then, Meghji said growing demand and tighter supply constraints have driven market rents up by 84%. “Against this backdrop, we’ve invested significant capital to build QTS into the fastest-growing data centre company in the world,” he claimed.
“In the first three and a half years under our ownership, QTS grew in size by more than 900%,” he added. “We’ve also launched Lumina CloudInfra, a data center provider in India, and established a joint venture with data centre provider Digital Realty to help build four hyperscale data center campuses across two continents.”
2025 investments are already underway
Khuda has praised the very public backing from new owners Blackstone and has identified 2025 as a pivotal year for the data centre company. For example, Singapore and Johor are key markets for AirTrunk as both markets are data centre and AI hubs in South-East Asia. In Singapore, AirTrunk has already invested a billion dollars and in Malaysia, it was ahead of the game, according to Khuda, announcing its flagship Johor Bahru data centre (JHB1) with over AUD 1 billion direct investment in early 2022.
“Since 2020, AirTrunk has been the largest Australian company investor in Malaysia and the 12th largest in Singapore,” said Khuda. “We are bringing Australia closer to Asia and in particular to the fastest growing economies of South-East Asia, which many Australian businesses haven’t been able to successfully do over the past 100 years.”
Khuda added that the recent opening of the special economic zone in Johor is going to open up big opportunities for the data centre company. “Soon AirTrunk will announce multi billion-dollar investments in both Singapore and Johor that will further strengthen our commitment to accelerate the growth of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) in South-East Asia,” he posted recently on LinkedIn.
[1] https://www.blackstone.com/insights/article/behind-the-deal-airtrunk/
[Author: Simon Dux]