AirTrunk racked up $618 million (A$850 million) to fund a major expansion of its Australian data centres. The Singapore-based data centre company also plans to expand its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Deutsche Bank is the underwriter for the new financing round. The increasing demand for hyperscale data centre solutions is the driving force behind the recent financing process.
The financing is considered to be the largest by a data centre company in Australia. AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda said, “We saw a substantial amount of global interest in AirTrunk throughout the process and are delighted to complete this financing arrangement with Deutsche Bank. Together with the new capital recently contributed by our shareholders, the new funds put us in a strong position to meet the growing demand from large cloud, content and enterprise customers in the Asia-Pacific region.”
The major portion of the latest financing will be dedicated to its data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. According to AirTrunk, the expansion will support a total of 174 megawatts within 12 months and 100 MW will be available for customers.
The rest of the funding will be used to pursue aggressive growth opportunities in Asia, with a special focus on Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The facilities in the region are expected to be available by 2020.
The data centre operator aims to meet the growing demand in the cloud computing market in Asia-Pacific markets. As per the estimates of the research firm IDC, public cloud demand in the Asia Pacific region excluding Japan will hit $47 billion by 2020. This leaves AirTrunk a tremendous opportunity.
AirTrunk is confident that it can seize the opportunity in the cloud computing market. “Our Australian business grew faster than expected so it’s been a sizeable focus and key priority. In the next three years I wouldn’t be surprised if we made an additional A$3-5 billion in investments,” said Khuda.
AirTrunk opened its two data centres last year—AirTrunk Sydney in September and AirTrunk Melbourne in November. In February 2017, Airtrunk had raised A$150 million from ING Groep NV and Natixis SA. Apart from that, it had also bagged $400 million in a funding round co-led by Goldman Sachs and an arm of private equity giant TPG.
