Macquarie Takes on $410M Korean Hyperscale Data Centre Partnership

After scoring Asia Pacific’s biggest data centre payday ever with the $16 billion sale of Australia’s Airtrunk to Blackstone and CPPIB in 2024, Macquarie Asset Management is making a fresh bet on digital infrastructure with an investment in South Korea.

The Australian investment manager said in a statement on Tuesday that it has entered a partnership with KOSDAQ-listed cloud provider Gabia Inc to jointly invest approximately KRW 600 billion ($420 million) to develop hyperscale data centres in South Korea over the next four to six years.

With Amazon’s cloud services division having committed late last year to invest $5 billion through 2031 to grow its South Korea business, while competitors Alibaba and Tencent take on their own initiatives, Macquarie and its partner aim to develop more  than 100MW of capacity in the northern Asian nation.

After Macquarie had invested in Airtrunk in 2020 through the second edition of its Macquarie Asia-Pacific Infrastructure Fund, the investment manager is partnering with Gabia through its Macquarie Asia-Pacific Infrastructure Fund IV, which is said to be raising around $5 billion for deals in the region. 

Securing an Operating Partner 

As an initial project, Macquarie and Gabia will develop a 40MW data centre in Ansan, an industrial hub 30 kilometres south of central Seoul in Gyeonggi province. Macquarie said in its statement that the Ansan development will complement an existing Gabia data centre in nearby Gwacheon, which is reported to have a total IT capacity of 10MW. 

Under the terms of the partnership, Macquarie will lead asset origination, financing, permitting and development for the data centre projects, while Gabia will handle design, construction and operation of the facilities through its Korea Internet Neutral Exchange (KINX) digital infrastructure unit. 

The two partners’ shares of capital contribution to the venture were not disclosed.

Founded by local tech entrepreneur Kim Hong-Gook in 1998, Gabia offers domain, hosting, cloud, internet data center, and security solutions. The firm is now about 25 percent owned by US asset manager Miri Capital Management and about 15 percent owned by Seoul-based activist investment firm Align Partners Capital Management. 

Gabia’s KINX unit had seven data centres in South Korea as of October 2025 including the Gwacheon facility. It also has one data centre in Tokyo and another in Hong Kong.

More Data Centres

Macquarie is taking on the partnership less than two years after acquiring a 40MW data centre in Hanam, also in Gyeonggi province. In August 2024 the Aussie investor agreed to pay KRW 734 billion to acquire the soon to be completed data centre from Seoul-based IGIS Asset Management. 

In addition to its sale of AirTrunk to Blackstone and CPPIB, Macquarie announced in October last year that it had agreed to sell Dallas-based Aligned Data Centres, which operates a network of facilities across North and South America to a consortium of investors comprising the AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), MGX and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners at an enterprise value of approximately $40 billion. 

In 2022 Macquarie agreed to pay around $610 million for a minority stake in Indonesia’s Bersama Digital Infrastructure, which in March last year formed a 50:50 joint venture with Digital Realty to develop and operate data centres across Southeast Asia’s most populous nation.

Now known as Digital Realty Bersama, the joint venture took over two Jakarta facilities held by Bersama Digital Data Centres, a subsidiary of the Indonesian player.