That’s the rumor that emerged a few days ago. The Japanese telco and technology giant Softbank is said to be in talks to acquire the infrastructure investment company DigitalBridge, although details of any potential deal have not trickled out. But the Japanese telco and investment giant is thought to be looking to jump into the AI infrastructure world.
DigitalBridge’s portfolio is a who’s who list of next generation infrastructure investment. Vantage, DataBank, Switch, Zayo, Beanfield, ExteNet, and Yondr come to mind, and there are more. Most recently they signed an MOU with KT to develop AI data center infrastructure in Korea. The company has some over $100B in assets under management, but itself has been valued in the $2B range.
Softbank, which is led by the eccentric icon Masayoshi Son, is said to have been looking for an entry point to the AI boom for a while. But finding the resource to put toward the effort has been more difficult. Recently they sold a $5.83B stake in Nvidia to shift resources into OpenAI, which seems a bit of a two steps forward and one step backward kind of thing.
But they can make a deal happen for DigitalBridge, all of a sudden they’d have their thumb on a whole lot of AI-focused infrastructure development. I can certainly see the appeal.
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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Fiber Networks · Mergers and Acquisitions
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