Data Center Firm AirTrunk Considering $6B IPO

Data center provider AirTrunk is weighing a potential initial public offering that would value the company at $6.4B.

The Australian data center firm, backed by Macquarie Asset Management and PSP Investments, sent a request for proposals to seven banks this month to examine the possibility of an IPO on the Australian Securities Exchange. The review requested by AirTrunk and its investors will weigh an IPO against alternative pathways like selling a minority stake in the company, The Australian Financial Review first reported. 

Founded in 2016, AirTrunk develops and operates large-scale data centers and campuses across the Asia-Pacific market, primarily for Big Tech hyperscale tenants. The company has facilities in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. Macquarie and PSP Investments, short for the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, acquired a major stake in AirTrunk in 2020 in a deal that valued the firm at close to $2B. 

With record demand for data center capacity from hyperscale tenants like Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft outpacing global supply, providers like AirTrunk have been scrambling for the capital needed to fund development. AirTrunk was already active in raising capital in the past two months. The company obtained a $2.9B sustainability-linked loan, the largest syndicated deal in Australia in 2023, according to Bloomberg. 

Should AirTrunk decide to go forward with an IPO, it could be an inflection point for a data center sector that has largely fled from public markets.

The industry’s period of record growth in 2021 and early 2022 saw four of the most prominent data center providers disappear from public markets in the largest flurry of M&A activity the sector has ever seen. Just a pair of publicly traded data center REITs remain. The consensus over the past three years has been that private capital is better equipped to fund the industry’s unprecedented expansion, with a growing pool of institutional investors eager to deploy capital into the space.  

But as Bisnow reported last month, that calculus may be starting to shift.  

While private capital has fueled the industry’s recent expansion, the next round of data center IPOs could be coming soon. A growing chorus of industry insiders is pointing to Wall Street as the best option for certain providers as their ballooning scale and value tests the limits of the private market’s ability to fund growth. 

“For some of these platforms that have become so exceedingly large, there is a discussion now in its very early days, the green shoots of which are dictating that they may need to tap into the public markets for growth,” Irtiaz Ahmad, managing director and head of digital infrastructure and services coverage at Solomon Partners, told Bisnow in August.