GIC, Munich Re to Invest $1.5B in Vantage European Data Centre Platform

Singapore sovereign giant GIC and Germany’s Munich Re Group are investing a combined €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion) into the Europe, Middle East and Africa platform of US hyperscale operator Vantage Data Centers.

The deals are to be finalised in the first quarter of 2025, subject to satisfaction of certain closing conditions such as regulatory approvals, Vantage said Monday in a release. Vantage’s EMEA portfolio includes 2.5 gigawatts of operational or under-development IT capacity.

The commitments by the $801 billion Singaporean fund and the German reinsurer’s MEAG asset management arm are aimed at expanding Vantage’s investor base and capital sources, enhancing the company’s ability to deliver high-quality, sustainable hyperscale data centre campuses to customers, the Denver-based group said.

“This transaction represents GIC’s first investment in the Vantage EMEA business and an expansion of MEAG’s investment in Vantage’s EMEA platform,” said Vantage, a unit of US private equity firm DigitalBridge.

Going Global on Data Centres

GIC’s latest splash in digital infrastructure comes after the fund announced in October that it had formed a joint venture with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and server-hosting titan Equinix to develop data centre campuses in the US.

GIC and CPPIB each hold a 37.5 percent interest, with Equinix taking the remaining quarter stake in the JV, which aims to raise $15 billion to fund construction of hyperscale facilities providing more than 1.5GW of capacity.

GIC previously teamed up with NASDAQ-listed Equinix for data centre ventures in Asia Pacific, Europe and the Americas. CPPIB and JV partner Blackstone are nearing completion of their $16 billion acquisition of Australia-based APAC data centre platform AirTrunk.

Vantage in October announced its appointment of Jeremy Deutsch as APAC president after he had served in the same role at Equinix since 2019. Deutsch is tasked with driving regional growth in APAC, where Vantage has 452 megawatts of capacity across eight operational or under-development data centre campuses.

The sale to GIC and Munich Re comes after Vantage last year raised capital by forming an investment partnership with a fund managed by DigitalBridge and invested by the German group, together with infrastructure asset manager Infranity. That partnership took possession of a set of six stabilised Vantage data centres in Europe with 177MW of combined IT capacity in a deal valuing the portfolio at €2.5 billion.

In May of this year, Vantage raised another €750 million from Ares Management, CDPQ and Schroders Capital in a deal that combined debt and equity financing. During this month the company sold $114 million in bonds via the Singapore exchange, marking its first debt raise in APAC.

In June, Vantage closed on a $9.2 billion equity investment led by DigitalBridge and investment bank Silver Lake, noting at the time that the milestone brought the company to $11 billion in new investment in the past nine months.

Boom to Continue

The global data centre market is expected to reach $300 billion in value by the end of 2024 and exceed $483 billion by 2029, according to a report released this month by DLA Piper.

A survey conducted by the law firm revealed that 70 percent of data centre investors and operators are predicting increased investment in data centres in the next two years, though 98 percent have concerns about the availability and reliability of power supplies for projects.

Developed economies like Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore are spearheading early-stage development of larger data centre projects, the report said, while each Southeast Asian market is evolving at its own pace and scale.

“We have seen a shift towards building data centres in less traditional locations due to power constraints in major cities,” said Susheela Rivers, head of APAC real estate in DLA Piper’s Hong Kong office.