The acquisition was agreed last year, when Digital Realty’s Brazilian subsidiary, Stellar Participações, agreed to buy Ascenty from private equity firm Great Hill Partners in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion. Brookfield committed to fund half of the equity investment, estimated at around $613 million.
“We are pleased to have closed the joint venture with Brookfield, our exclusive vehicle for data centre investment in South America,” said Digital Realty CEO Bill Stein (pictured).
“We see a significant runway to support our customers’ digital transformation within an historically under-served region poised for rapid growth, and our partnership with Brookfield provides unique local expertise with a longstanding legacy of successful infrastructure investments.”
Brookfield, based in Toronto, is one of the largest real-estate investors in Brazil, where it has $25 billion of assets under management, including toll roads, logistics and gas distribution.
Its 2015 investment in French company TDF brought 7,000 towers and rooftop sites into its portfolio, plus 5,500km of fibre backbone. In January this year it completed acquisition of AT&T’s data centre colocation operations for $1.1 billion.
Digital Realty CFO Andrew Power said about the Ascenty deal with Brookfield: “We believe this platform represents a compelling growth opportunity, and we expect it will be accretive to financial metrics over the intermediate term, and highly accretive to Digital Realty’s long-term growth profile.”
