AirTrunk sells for $23.5b

AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda has cemented his billionaire status after clinching the sale of his nine-year-old data centre business to Blackstone. The deal valued AirTrunk at $23.5 billion which highlights the wealth created by the artificial intelligence boom and made it the biggest corporate deal of the year.

AirTrunk has 11 data centres across Australia, Malaysia and Japan and is at the cutting edge of hyperscale cloud computing – the term used to describe the world’s biggest cloud computing providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which are all tenants of AirTrunk data centres.

Khuda has had a long association with data centres having worked previously as chief financial officer of Pipe Networks, then at NextDC before a short spell at Mint. He started up AirTrunk in 2015 in order to focus on selling data centre space to the giant tech firms.In 2020, Khuda agreed to sell 88 per cent of AirTrunk to Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets.