Welsh operator NGD has been acquired by InfraVia Capital Partners in a deal worth a reported £100 million ($130 million).
InfraVia Capital Partners, a French investment company operating in the infrastructure sector, said it has acquired a majority stake in NGD (Next Generation Data) which operates a 750,000 sq ft data center near Newport. The value of the deal remains undisclosed, but WalesOnline reports the value of the equity investment in NGD is about £100 million, including growth capital from the private equity firm’s newly created European Fund III.
Second site
NGD’s Newport data center was opened in 2010 on the site of a former LG semi-conductor plant, a property that had stood vacant for more than a decade prior to development.
It has attracted large multinational clients, the company said, including a number of major cloud service providers. Customers have included several UK government departments, BT, CGI and IBM, as well as numerous local companies.
NGD gets all its power from the giant Welsh Dynorwig hydroelectric plant.
The InfraVia capital will be used in part to expand NGD’s UK data center capacity, to include the addition of a second site as well as connection of additional high-speed transatlantic fiber communications networks.
The second data center is likely to be located in Wales or South West England, according to Wales Online.
The investment will also bolster international sales efforts as the company looks to bring in clients from North America and Asia.
Brexit benefit
NGD founders Simon Taylor, its chairman, and Nick Razey, its chief executive, remain significant shareholders after the deal and will retain their positions on the new board. Dr Simon Orebi Gann remains non-executive director. All operational management will stay with the company.
Mr Taylor said: “With the additional financial resources of InfraVia, we will be able to take our business to the next level by maximizing repeat and new-business opportunities as global organizations continue to demand more data center space and power for accommodating increased cloud computing deployments.
“In addition, we believe that Brexit will possibly increase the on-shoring of data, which we see as positive for NGD going forward.”
Vincent Levita, founder and chief executive of InfraVia, said: “We have been impressed by the momentum achieved by the management team.
“And we believe that NGD is ideally positioned to capture further growth thanks to its unique offering, flexible expansion potential and high-quality infrastructure.
“We are delighted to start the deployment of our third fund with NGD and our ambition is to provide the company with long-term institutional capital to embark into a new development phase.”
The carrier-neutral Tier 3 Newport facility has its own private connection to the National SuperGrid. It generates up to 180MW of power from 100 percent renewable sources.
The SuperGrid covers parts of the electricity power system connected at voltages of more than 200kV.
The 750,000 sq ft Welsh data center has in the past been billed as the continent’s largest data center, a title that will be inherited by a new facility being constructed in Norway, which plans to open in August 2016.