Blackstone's AirTrunk targets India for its next data facility: CEO

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By Angus Whitley

 

AirTrunk, the Australian data-centreoperator bought by Blackstone Inc. last year for A$24 billion ($16 billion), will build its next facility in India to help meet overwhelming demand in the sector, said founder and Chief Executive Officer Robin Khuda.

 

Investors are pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the data centers required to power them. AirTrunk in August closed a A$16 billion refinancing to build or keep operating data centers in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore.

 

“This is the single-biggest gold rush in human history,” Khuda said at a Forbes conference in Sydney on Thursday, referring to global investments in artificial intelligence. 

 

AirTrunk’s construction plans in India are “pretty advanced,” Khuda said. India’s 1.5 billion population, with a large proportion of young people who are active online, gives it obvious appeal, he said.

 

There’s more than enough demand across Asia for data centers to sustain both AirTrunk and its competitors, Khuda said. “It’s not like there’s only one winner who will take home everything,” he said.

 

Khuda has said the data-centreindustry is so capital-intensive that it needs hundreds of billions of dollars to meet demand and deliver on planned expansion. The AirTrunk acquisition was Blackstone’s biggest-ever purchase in the Asia-Pacific region and was also one of the world’s largest in digital infrastructure deals in 2024.

 

Still, even Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman has cautioned that the electricity required to power data centers could be in short supply.