Major shareholder lifts investment as Canberra Data Centres braces for AI boom

Canberra Data Centres is seeing an unprecedented increase in what it called “customer discussions”, many tied to AI-related workloads, CEO Greg Boorer said today.

That opportunity has prompted major investor Infratil, which owns just shy of 50 per cent of CDC, to launch a NZ$1.15 billion capital raising on the New Zealand bourse, of which around A$646 million was expected to go to CDC over the next two years.

“Including reservations and rights-of-first refusals, over the last 18 months we have signed contracts for 200MW+ of capacity and we continue to see higher demand in the Australian and New Zealand markets,” Boorer said.

CDC had been “AI-ready” for more than 15 years, he said, and was well positioned to capture strong share of AI-driven demand.

The company’s recently announced Marsden Park campus, in Sydney, was a direct response to that demand, he said.

While no announcement has been made, Australia’s Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation and the Future Fund, CDC’s other major shareholders, would presumably have to invest at a similar level to maintain their shareholding percentages.

Infratil CEO Jason Boyes said CDC had been one of the company’s most successful investments, with its stake currently independently valued at NZ$4.4 billion, approximately ten times the amount first invested in 2016.

CDC continued to see a surge in demand for data centre capacity, Boyes said.

“The proceeds of the equity raising will be used to fund its accelerated growth, and provide additional balance sheet flexibility to allow Infratil to continue to invest across our portfolio.”

Cloud adoption and significant investments in generative AI were driving growth, Boyes said.

“This rapid increase in demand has seen CDC enter advanced negotiations with customers for over 400MW of capacity at multiple sites across the CDC footprint with this capacity expected to come online over the next four to five years,” he said.