Over 300 employees of an Australian data center firm are getting a nice surprise this holiday season, after U.S. private equity giant Blackstone bought the company.
AirTrunk announced on LinkedIn that it will give away 22 million Australian dollars ($14 million) to its 330 workers as a holiday bonus, which works out to about $41,300 per employee.
The Australian company is disbursing the money to celebrate its acquisition by Blackstone, announced earlier this year. In September, the U.S. private equity company offered to take over the company for $16 billion, several times more than AirTrunk’s $2 billion valuation in its last funding round in 2020.
It’s Blackstone’s largest-ever investment in the Asia-Pacific region. The AirTrunk acquisition is a “vital step as Blackstone seeks to be the leading digital infrastructure investor in the world,” Blackstone president Jon Gray said in a statement at the time.
Robin Khuda founded AirTrunk in 2015, and opened the country’s first and largest hyperscale data center in 2017. Besides Australia, the company has operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and the Chinese city of Hong Kong, all key nodes in the data center ecosystem.
Khuda is now expected to walk away with about $636 million following the Blackstone acquisition.
Companies are pledging billions of dollars for data centers, needed to provide the computing power needed to train and run today’s cutting-edge AI models. In mid-September, a consortium including Microsoft and BlackRock pledged $100 billion towards new investments in AI infrastructure. (Microsoft is also behind the project to restart Three Mile Island, the U.S. nuclear power plant, and plans to use the electricity generated for its AI endeavors)
Investors, too, are driving up the shares of companies that build, supply and operate data centers.
The boom helped AirTrunk get a better deal from its suitors. According to Reuters, AirTrunk’s price tag rose during the sales process, which started in March, due to increased investor interest in data centers.
