Mubadala buys minority stake in US data centre firm

WAM

Abu Dhabi sovereign investor Mubadala Investment Company has taken a minority stake in a US-based data centre company, as it ramps up its global investments in digital infrastructure.

Texas-headquartered Aligned Data Centres (Aligned) has the majority of its operations in North America, but this year has expanded into Latin America by acquiring LatAm data centre provider ODATA.

The buyout positioned Aligned among the largest private data centre operators in the Americas, expanding its footprint to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.

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Khaled Abdulla Al Qubaisi, CEO of real estate and infrastructure investments at Mubadala, said: “Our investment will support Aligned’s rapid expansion, further reinforcing the company’s position as a preferred partner in the Pan-American data centre market.”

The Aligned investment is part of Mubadala’s rapidly expanding global digital infrastructure portfolio, headed by its executive director Mounir Barakat.

It announced plans in June to invest $500 million in Brightspeed, a US-based broadband and telecommunications services company.

Last year it invested $350 million into Princeton Digital Group, a pan-Asian data centre company. It has also invested £800 million ($1 billion) into CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent full-fibre platform.

Investor appetite for data centres in the Middle East is soaring, particularly the Gulf, AGBI reported last month.

Experts say they are seeing increased levels of investment and interest from international operators, who are looking to capitalise on the region’s growing need for data processing and storage.

US-based asset manager DigitalBridge Group announced in May that the Saudi Public Investment Fund has invested in a partnership that aims to develop data centres in Saudi Arabia and across the GCC

Tech giant Microsoft also plans to invest in a new cloud data centre region in the kingdom, promising “high availability and additional tolerance to data centre failures.”