Actis, a leading global investor in sustainable infrastructure, has agreed to acquire 11 data centres across six countries in Latin America and the US from Nabiax, a European data centre operator owned by independent investment management firm Asterion Industrial Partners and service provider Telefonica.
Asterion Industrial Partners, which acquired Telefonica’s data centre assets four years ago, will continue to own, operate and grow its European assets, while Actis will be the new owner of the data centres in the Americas. The data centres are based in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Argentina. There is also a small exposure in Florida in the US.
The 11 locations have a combined IT load capacity of 23 MW with the potential to expand.
The assets were originally built by Telefonica for both its own operations and for its own clients; the company remains an anchor tenant under a long-term contract.
This transaction is the seventh investment by Actis in the digital infrastructure industry; Actis has over US$1billion currently committed in the sector. The deal complements Actis’ five existing data centre platforms in Asia and Africa.
Actis clearly sees this as a timely investment. The Latin American data centre sector market is forecast to grow by 2.5 times over the next five years, driven by continued expansion in data creation and consumption, adoption of cloud computing and storage, outsourced co-location trends, big data and artificial intelligence.