Airtel sells 25% stake in data centre business to Carlyle for $235 million

Airtel on Wednesday announced that the Carlyle Group-owned Comfort Investments II will invest $235 million in Nxtra Data Limited (Nxtra), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airtel that deals with the data centre business.

Carlyle will acquire a 25% stake in Nxtra with the new investment. Airtel says the post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is approximately $1.2 billion. Airtel will continue to hold the remaining stake of approximately in the data centre business.

Airtel’s Nxtra has 10 large data centres in India. It also has over 120 edge data centres that offer services such as data backup, cloud infrastructure, remote infrastructure management, and more.

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Airtel in its release pointed out that Carlyle has prior experience in the data centre business through investments in Coresite in the US and Itconic in Spain. The group has also invested in India. Some of its top investments are SBI Life, SBI Card, HDFC, India Infoline, Delhivery and PNB Housing Finance, as well as the recently announced Piramal Pharma Limited and SeQuent Scientific Limited.

The announcement comes weeks after parent Bharti Airtel sold 2.75% stake in Airtel. The company raised ₹8,433 crore ($1.15 billion) through an accelerated book-building process in the secondary market.

Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel, commented: “At Airtel, we have built a robust data centre 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 centre offerings. Rapid digitization has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centres 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.”