(Bloomberg) — Macquarie Group Ltd.’s recent mega-deal aiming to sell AirTrunk was just an act of data center preparation, Chief Executive Officer Shemara Wikramanayake said.
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The Australian investment bank has 4.3 gigawatts of data center capacity globally, and almost a third of its asset management arm’s investments are in digital infrastructure, Wikramanayake said. The company is betting on higher revenues in this unit through the sale of additional investments in the future, including part of the data center business.
“There is a long way to go,” she said in an interview Friday after the bank released its annual results. “The sector as a whole will need a lot more investment.”
Even after agreeing to sell its stake in AirTrunk to Blackstone Inc. and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the bank has stakes in other computer processing companies around the world. These include Bohao Internet Data Services, Aligned Data Centers, Netrality Data Centers and VIRTUS Data Centers Ltd., among others, she said.
When a group led by Macquarie’s investment arm bought AirTrunk in 2020, the deal valued it at around A$3 billion ($2 billion). Blackstone agreed to acquire it in September for A$24 billion.
“Generative AI is in its early stages and you have seen, not only in data centers but also in the energy sector, some very large deals announced,” she said.
Wikramanayake highlighted the recent development to revive the Three-Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, with the owner selling production to Microsoft Corp. She also highlighted how Amazon.com Inc. is investing in small nuclear reactors.
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The veteran infrastructure investor is yet to look at nuclear power, but said “it’s a solution that we as a world need to look at” alongside hydrogen and solar storage. large-scale batteries because data centers require stable 24/7 power, which renewable energy struggles to provide. .
“Even though today it seems like the economics aren’t working, we need to invest in these types of technologies to try to scale them,” she said.
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