Data centre is InfraVia Fund III’s debut deal

InfraVia has acquired a controlling stake in Next Generation Data (NGD), a Welsh-based data centre that the French firm bills as Europe’s largest.

The transaction marks the first deal by InfraVia’s Fund III, which the asset manager is currently raising with a target of €750m.

Financial details for the transaction were not disclosed, but sources close to the matter told Infrastructure Investor that the deal was valued at about £100 million ($130 million; €117 million). InfraVia declined to comment.

NGD put its 750,000 sq ft data centre in service in early 2010, and has since gained a clientele composed of big cloud computing service providers. The site benefits from its own private connection to the National SuperGrid, with up to 180MW of power generated from renewable sources – equivalent to the needs of a city the size of Bristol, InfraVia and NGD said.

InfraVia’s capital injection will be used to expand NGD’s capacity by acquiring a second site and connect the business to further transatlantic fibre communications networks, as well as to help fund the company sales’ push in North America and Asia.

Simon Taylor and Nick Razey, NGD’s founders, are to retain a “significant” stake in the business, InfraVia said.

It is the second time the firm steps into the data storage sector, after it participated in a €15 million capital increase at Etix Everywhere, a company specialising in the construction, financing and operation of modular data centres, in February last year.

InfraVia has deployed nearly all of its €530 million Fund II, which lately was used to back Nordic power platform Aurora Infrastucture (in September 2015) and Metro de Malaga (in December 2015). Last March, the firm sold a 49.9 percent stake in French onshore wind farm portfolio company Aalto Power to France's Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.