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 million 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]