The Carlyle Group has acquired a 24.04% stake in Nxtra Data, the data center business which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, India’s largest integrated telecommunications operator.
“We wish to submit that upon conversion of 17.88 million non-cumulative 0.0001 percent compulsory convertible preference shares of face value Rs 1000 each aggregating to Rs 1,788 crore, CA Cloud Investments (Carlyle) now holds 24.04% stake in Nxtra,” said Bharti Airtel in a filing.
Previously in July 2020, the Carlyle Group had announced its intention to invest up to $235 million in acquiring a stake of 25% in Nxtra Data at a valuation of $1.2 billion.
“At Airtel, we have built a robust data center portfolio that is future-ready and scalable. For us, the security and data privacy requirements of our customers are our top priorities, which we have established as a key differentiator for our data center offerings. Rapid digitization has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centers in India and we plan to accelerate our investments to become a major player in this segment. We are delighted to have Carlyle as a strategic partner in this exciting journey, particularly given their experience in this industry, and look forward to working with them”, said Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel.
Neeraj Bharadwaj, Managing Director of the Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team, commented, “India is set to become one of the largest markets in the world for digital services. Airtel, with its proven track record of solid execution and customer focus, is well-positioned to leverage the potential growth of data centers in India. We look forward to collaborating with Airtel to unlock the full potential of Nxtra.”
Currently, Nxtra is operating 10 large data centers and 120 edge data centers in India providing services like co-location, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management to its customers. It is focusing on making large investments during the coming years for increasing its data center capacity across India. The demand for data centers is expected to grow significantly in India with the 5G launch happening soon. As more and more businesses are becoming part of the digital transformation to scale their operations, the requirement for data centers is not going to cease. The cash inflow from the Carlyle Group will enable Nxtra to make even larger investments faster!
Carlyle’s previous data center deals include investments in Coresite in the US and Itconic in Spain.
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