The investor, which owns Freshwave, Highline do Brasil and Vantage Data Centers, as well as half of Zayo, is announcing the move just a day after its Colony Capital said it is offloading most of its non-digital assets to New York-based Fortress Investment.
The move revives an old name: Digital Bridge, but with a space between the words, was the company led by Marc Ganzi that merged with Colony Capital in 2019.
The company will reveal its new logo on 22 June, said marketing director Cecilia Reissmeier (pictured with old logo). “We will re-brand Colony Capital and Digital Colony under one brand: one company moving onward — DigitalBridge,” she told Capacity.
(British users of search engines should be aware that there is another DigitalBridge, a company that designs kitchens and bathrooms, based in the city of Manchester.)
The US DigitalBridge said: “The new name reflects the significant business transformation the company has undergone since the leadership and board of directors made the bold decision to chart a new direction — years ago — realigning a diversified real estate investment firm to focus exclusively on the fast-growing digital infrastructure sector.”
The name “[evokes] its heritage as an early innovator in digital infrastructure, while looking forward to a fully digital, interconnected future”, said the company.
Ganzi said: “The vision we crafted, bringing a digital infrastructure platform built on two decades of operating experience and deep industry relationships together with an institutional capital formation capability and global enterprise-grade operations, has reached its next phase.”
He said DigitalBridge is “a unique digital infrastructure business, with both the operating DNA and access to institutional capital that positions us to execute globally on a converging digital infrastructure ecosystem”.
The company will “build, operate, and finance a new era in connectivity, leveraging a single platform focused on the full spectrum of digital infrastructure including towers, data centres, fiber, and small cells”, he added.
The group is “on track to rotate” US$100 billion of assets under management “from diversified to digital”, he said. It is “now 80% rotated on a pro forma basis” following yesterday’s Fortress announcement.
Board chair Nancy Curtin said: “As the digital economy continues to grow rapidly, DigitalBridge is well-positioned to capitalise on the powerful secular tailwinds supporting the continued investment in digital infrastructure.”
