Mubadala to exit its holdings in US data centre company Cologix

Cologix will be transferred to another Stonepeak-managed vehicle

Inside Cologix's server room. The company has more than 600 networks and more than 300 cloud providers across the platform. Photo: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners

Mubadala Investment Company has said it reached a deal with the US-based investment firm Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners to sell its share in data centre company Cologix for an undisclosed sum.

Cologix will be transferred from Stonepeak Infrastructure Fund II LP and co-investors (Fund II) to another Stonepeak-managed vehicle comprising a combination of some existing Fund II investors and a number of new third-party investors, Mubadala said in a statement late on Thursday.

The transaction is expected to close in early 2022.

“Our success as a leading investor lies in our ability to identify uniquely placed. quality businesses to venture into, and equally importantly, assess monetisation opportunities to ensure that we maintain significant capital growth and a healthy portfolio of business investments,” said Khaled Al Qubaisi, chief executive of Real Estate and Infrastructure Investments at Mubadala.

“We firmly believe that our involvement with Cologix ticked all those boxes from the outset and we are pleased to have contributed to this successful partnership.”

Cologix has more than 600 networks and more than 300 cloud providers across the platform. The company provides critical IT infrastructure to more than 1,600 customers through its operations that span 40 interconnection and hyperscale data centres in 11 North American markets.

Remote working and learning to contain the spread of Covid-19 has sparked a big demand for data centres around the world.

The data centre services market was valued at $48.90 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 13.69 per cent to reach $105.6bn by 2026, Modor Intelligence reported.

Meanwhile, spending on public cloud services is expected to surge 16.1 per cent to $692.1bn in 2025 compared to $242.6bn in 2019, Gartner predicted.

Mubadala has been a co-investor in Cologix with Stonepeak Fund II LP since January 2020. The Abu Dhabi company had said it would invest up to $500 million in Cologix in 2019 when it acquired a stake alongside Stonepeak.

The companies have helped Cologix grow through mergers and acquisitions and through organic growth, the statement added.

Since 2017, Cologix has invested about $1bn of incremental capital in building out the company’s footprint through various organic and inorganic initiatives.