Data centre platform Princeton Digital Group (PDG) on Tuesday said it has closed an equity investment of $500 million (around Rs 3,750) led by Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala.
The round saw $350 million investment from Mubadala, along with the participation from both the existing investors Warburg Pincus and Ontario Teachers’.
Following this fundraise, the company looks to more than treble its secured capacity of 600 megawatts in the next five years.
PDG said it seeks to strengthen its position as the top Pan-Asian data centre operator by expanding its footprint in Japan, India, Singapore, China and Indonesia, as well as speeding up its ambitions to expand into new countries.
According to Bloomberg, the funding may lift Princeton Digital's valuation to more than $2 billion and act as a stepping stone to a prospective initial public offering (IPO).
PDG, which was founded in 2017 by the company's chairman Rangu Salgame and Chief Operating Officer Varoon Raghavan in partnership with Warburg Pincus, will expand its footprint in Singapore, India, China, Japan, and Indonesia. It operates 20 data centres in 14 different cities.
Salgame was previously the CEO of the Growth Ventures Group at Tata Communications, where he ran a global multi-billion-dollar portfolio for the company and was responsible for ramping up its data centre business.
He had also worked with Cisco Systems and Verizon Communications in his 25-year career.
“Mubadala’s track record of long-term investments combined with extensive know-how in the digital infrastructure space makes it a great partner as we continue to scale our business,” Salgame said
“PDG is a leading data center infrastructure platform operating in an attractive market with strong tailwinds and catering to rising demand from the hyper-scale segment and more broadly Asia’s digital economies.
We look forward to working with PDG’s management team to capitalize on the growth opportunities and create not only sustainable, long term value creation, but also support Asia’s digital infrastructure development as a vital enabler to economic progress,” Khaled Abdulla Al Qubaisi, Chief Executive Officer, Real Estate and Infrastructure Investments at Mubadala said.
Data centres around the world are experiencing record demand from cloud giants like Amazon, streaming platforms, and other internet services companies, which are attracting financial investors. Asia has become a data centre hotspot. Equinix, Digital Realty and China's GDS Holdings are all competitors for PDG.
In 2017, Private equity firm Warburg Pincus invested $300 million which was then named Princeton Growth Ventures (PGV), to acquire standalone as well as carve-out assets in India, China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Mubadala Investment Company is a sovereign wealth fund with a $243.4 billion portfolio spread over six continents.
