Macquarie Bets on AI Data-Center Boom Even After AirTrunk Sale

(Bloomberg) -- Macquarie Group Ltd.’s recent megadeal to sell AirTrunk was just a warm up act when it comes to data centers, chief executive Shemara Wikramanayake said.

The Australian investment bank owns 4.3 gigawatts of data center capacity worldwide, and almost a third of the investments by its asset management arm are in digital infrastructure, Wikramanayake said. The firm is betting on higher income in that unit from the sale of more investments in the future, with a swathe of data center businesses part of that.

“There’s a long way to run,” she said in an interview following the bank’s full year results on Friday. “The sector at large is going to need a lot more investment.” 

Even after agreeing to sell its stake in AirTrunk to Blackstone Inc. and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the bank has holdings in other computer processing firms around the world. Those include Bohao Internet Data Services, Aligned Data Centers, Netrality Data Centers and VIRTUS Data Centres Ltd., among others, she said. 

When a group led by Macquarie’s investment arm bought AirTrunk in 2020, the deal valued it at about A$3 billion ($2 billion). Blackstone agreed to acquire it in September for A$24 billion. 

“Generative AI is in an early stage and you’ve seen, not just in data centers but also in energy, very large transactions being announced,” she said. 

Wikramanayake noted the recent development to revive the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, with the owner selling the output to Microsoft Corp. She also pointed out how Amazon.com Inc. is investing in small nuclear reactors.

The veteran infrastructure investor has not yet taken an interest in nuclear power but said “it’s a solution we as a world have to look at” alongside hydrogen and utility scale battery storage, because data centers require firmed 24/7 power that renewables struggle to provide. 

“Even though today it doesn’t seem like the economics work, we do need investment done in these sort of technologies to try to get them to scale,” she said. 

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