Carlyle to acquire about 25% stake in Airtel’s Data Centre business for $1.2 billion

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel on Monday announced that the Carlyle Group will acquire about 25 per cent stake in Airtel's data centre business, Nxtra Data, for USD 1.2 billion.

“The post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is approximately US$1.2 billion and Carlyle will hold a stake of approximately 25% in the business upon completion of the transaction, with Airtel continuing to hold the remaining stake of approximately 75%. The transaction is subject to the necessary regulatory approvals, including approval from the Competition Commission of India,” Airtel said in a BSE filing.

Nxtra from Airtel offers secure data centre services to leading Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments. Nxtra’s nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres provides customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.

“India is witnessing a considerable surge in demand for secure data centres as businesses undertake digital transformation and consumer demand for digital services continues to increase. The expansion of hyperscalers across the region following the government’s directive on data localization is propelling a lot of this demand, with other market drivers including the growth in user data and increase in cloud penetration,” Airtel said.