Carlyle completes acquisition of 24% stake in Airtel's data centre business

The Carlyle Group has acquired a 24.04% stake in a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharti Airtel engaged in the data centre business.

The multinational private equity company had in July 2020 announced that it intended to invest up to $235 million to acquire a 25% stake in Nxtra Data at a valuation of $1.2 billion.

“We wish to submit that upon conversion of 17.88 million non-cumulative 0.0001 percent compulsory convertible preference shares of face value Rs 1000 each aggregating to Rs 1,788 crore, CA Cloud Investments (Carlyle) now holds 24.04% stake in Nxtra,” Bharti Airtel said in a filing.

Nxtra currently runs data centres in more than 120 locations, providing its customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.

In other data centre bets, Carlyle has invested in Coresite in the US and Itconic in Spain.

The company has been making investments in India since 2000. Bets include SBI Life, SBI Card, HDFC, India Infoline, Delhivery, PNB Housing Finance, SeQuent Scientific, and Piramal Pharma.