The funds will also be used to “provide more flexibility for growth across Infratil’s global portfolio.”
CDC, which has built data centre sin Auckland Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, was described by Infratil’s CEO Jason Boyes as one of the company’s most successful investments.
Infratil’s stake in CDC is currently worth NZ$4,420 million, according to independent valuations, which represents a 10x increase from Infratil’s initial investment just eight years ago.
“CDC continues to see a surge in demand for data centre capacity. The proceeds of the equity raising will be used to fund its accelerated growth, and provide additional balance sheet flexibility to allow Infratil to continue to invest across our portfolio,” Boyes said.
Cloud adoption and investment in generative AI are driving demand to the extent that CDC has entered negotiations with its customers for over 400MW of capacity at multiple sites across its footprint.
This capacity is expected to come online in the next 4-5 years, according to Boyes, but CDC expects 200MW+ of capacity to commence construction over the next 12 months, including the first tranche of its Marsden Park development, a 720MW campus.
Infratil expects to commit equity funding of around A$600 million ($US396) to CDC over the next two years, or about 56% of the equity it has raised.
In addition to the investment in CDC, the rest of the capital will be put to use to expand Infratil’s to expand our renewables, digital and healthcare platforms.
Greg Boorer, CDC’s CEO said the company was seeing “an unprecedented increase in the number of customer discussions, many of which are tied to AI-related workloads”.
Boorer claims that CDC has been AI-ready for more than 15 years, and as such is well positioned to capture strong share of AI-driven demand.
“Including reservations and rights-of-first refusals, over the last 18 months we have signed contracts for 200MW+ of capacity and we continue to see higher demand in the Australian and New Zealand markets,” Boyer said.
“Our recently announced Marsden Park campus is in direct response to these demand signals and is a strong indicator of the step change in the scale of demand and development we expect to execute on in the period ahead.”
