The Carlyle Group announced an agreement under which Comfort Investments II will invest US$235 million in Nxtra Data Limited a wholly owned subsidiary of Airtel engaged in the data center business. According to the announcement, the post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is approximately US$1.2 billion and Carlyle will hold a stake of approximately 25% in Airtel’s data center business.
A strategic partnership
Nxtra from Airtel, headquartered in New Delhi, offers secure data center services to leading Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments. Airtel serves over 2,500 large businesses and over one million medium and small businesses. Nxtra provides customers co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management with its 10 large data centers and more than 120 edge data centers.
Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel, talked about the agreement, saying,
“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.”
Carlyle has invested in Coresite in the US and Itconic in Spain. The firm has deep local knowledge within India having been investing in the market since 2000.