By Scott Murdoch
SYDNEY (Reuters) -The head of Australia's Macquarie Asset Management (MAM), which sold its Aligned Data Centers business in a deal worth $40 billion, said on Thursday the sale was not a sign the global data centre boom had peaked.
Aligned emerged as one of the world's largest data centre operators during the seven years it was owned by MAM, the funds management arm of investment bank Macquarie Group.
MAM head Ben Way said the decision to sell to investors including BlackRock, Microsoft
and Nvidia, was not a warning sign for the sector or AI.
"We don't own businesses in perpetuity, we have owned this for seven years and it's at a great spot to exit and there's clearly massive demand to exit," Way told Reuters in a telephone interview.
As global companies ramp up investment in data centres and increase advanced chip purchases, driving up valuations of tech firms from OpenAI to Nvidia, fears are also growing that the spending spree could create a bubble.
Major tech companies including Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta, Microsoft and CoreWeave are expected to spend $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year, according to Morgan Stanley.
Aligned operates 5 GW of current and planned data centre capacity and MAM said the $40 billion price tag was Aligned's enterprise value. The firm did not provide a breakdown of the equity and debt components.
MAM announced on October 7 it would invest up to $5 billion in a partnership with Applied Digital to help fund the company's first two high-performance computing data centre developments.
"It's not that we don't think it's a good thematic, not that we don't believe in the thematic, it's not that we don't think we can continue to make money," Way said, referring to the Aligned sale.
"There's a long way to go here and that's because the world has a long way to digitalise and we're only just at the beginning," Way said. "We're at the precipice of AI endeavour, certainly not at the end."
MAM funds held about 50% of Aligned and its co-investors had a further 20%. The deal was the largest ever private equity exit for the Australian fund manager.
MAM also has investments in Bohao Internet Data Service, Hanam Data Centre, Netrality Data Centers and VIRTUS, which holds assets in the U.S., UK, China and South Korea, the company said.
Macquarie Group shares rose 5.13% on Thursday to A$229, the highest since July. The bank's gain well outpaced the 0.9% increase in S&P/ASX200.
(Reporting by Scott Murdoch; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
