Australian pension fund Aware Super will invest $300 million in an Asia Pacific data centre business, dispelling concerns the sector is becoming over-valued and at risk of becoming an asset bubble.
The Sydney-based fund said it will take a minority stake in the Skyline joint venture data centre business which owns Vantage Data Centres Asia Pacific.
Vantage owns 10 hyperscale data centres across Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
The transaction is the second major data centre deal for Aware in less than three years after it bought a stake in U.S-based data centre business Switch in 2023. Switch was taken private by DigitalBridge and an IFM Investors affiliate for $11 billion in late 2022.
Aware, which has A$210 billion ($141.48 billion) in funds under management, said it has A$6 billion ($4.04 billion)invested in digital infrastructure assets. The fund’s infrastructure portfolio is worth about A$22 billion ($14.82 billion), it said.
Aware’s head of infrastructure, Mark Hector, said while data centre deals were becoming increasingly valuable the fund was confident the sector was not becoming over-heated in price terms.
Australia’s Macquarie Asset Management in October sold its Aligned Data Centres business for $40 billion to a consortium led by BlackRock, Microsoft and Nvidia .
“I don’t think in the near term, we’re at risk of too much of a bubble,” Hector told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
“I think if you’re buying existing data centers or you’re buying something that is being built with signed contracts you know that as soon as you build it, you’ve got revenue contracts to pay for it,” he said.
“As long as you’re not prepaying today for a lot of that uncertain growth in the medium to the longer term, then you’re really controlling your valuation downside.”
Hector said Aware was keen to step up its Asian infrastructure investments, to add diversity to its existing portfolio of Australian, North American and European assets.
($1 = 1.4843 Australian dollars)
Reuters
