ESR Raises USD 1 Billion for First-Ever Data Centre Fund

With the support of sovereign wealth and pension institutions, ESR, an APAC real asset manager, has raised an initial $1 billion (€977 million) for its inaugural data centre fund.

ESR will issue a second discretionary capital sleeve to co-invest into the Data Centre Fund 1 fund, which will likely close the balance of the fund at the hard cap of US$1.5bn.

Additionally, the capital partners have an upsize option of an additional equity commitment of US$1.5bn, which would raise the total investment capacity to as much as US$7.5bn over time.

Jeffrey Shen and Stuart Gibson, co-founders and co-CEOs of ESR, stated as the leading new economy real estate platform in APAC, the firm was striving to satisfy the essential demand for digital infrastructure in the region.

Devashish Gupta, ESR data centres CIO, said: 

“The APAC data centre fund is uniquely placed to take advantage of ESR Group’s adjacencies in the land, power, fibre origination, strong pipeline of recently acquired data centre specific sites.”

Diarmid Massey, the ESR data centre CEO, noted that ESR’s objective was “naturally” to balance excessive energy use by aligning with its ESG plan to repair, re-develop, and convert some of the existing 39.8m sqm of assets into major and edge data centres.

Massey said the committee would study sustainable possibilities through actual renewable energy generation from the rooftops.

Source: IPE Real Assets

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