A still unconfirmed report says that Digital Realty is talking to Great Hill Partners, the private-equity owner of Ascenty. None of the partners are commenting on the report from Bloomberg, which cited “people with knowledge of the matter”.
According to Bloomberg the talks are about Digital Realty working with a joint venture partner, leading to speculation that this might by Mitsubishi, which already has a joint venture with it to operate data centres in Japan.
The report says that Ascenty’s customers in Brazil include Amazon, Facebook and Oracle. The company has its own 4,000km fibre network linking São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza, the coastal city that that has become a landing point for a number of subsea cables from the US, the Caribbean and Africa. The company opened its first data centre in São Paulo in March 2017 and was planning to open its second the following month.
Bloomberg reported in April 2018 that Great Hill was talking to potential buyers of Ascenty, though at the time it suggested other private equity investors were involved. The starting price was put at $1 billion, though the latest report says it could be much higher.
Great Hill describes Ascenty as “a leading provider of high bandwidth connectivity and data centre solutions primarily to large corporate enterprise clients and wireless communication carriers in Brazil”. It has owned a stake since 2011.
