Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Goldman Sachs backs Global Compute, a new data center player

The Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division will invest up to $500 million of equity capital in Global Compute Infrastructure, a new data center company. The Goldman Sach funding is expected to enable approximately $1.5 billion in near-term investments in Global Compute as its grows through data center acquisitions and new construction in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

Global Compute, which is headed by Scott Peterson, formerly Chief Investment officer and co-founder of Digital Realty, said it will focus on acquiring and developing facilities which can meet the growing compute, storage, connectivity and colocation deployment needs of the world’s largest technology companies. Peterson is joined by fellow DLR co-founder Christopher Kenney as COO, and former senior DLR executive in EMEA, Stephen Taylor as Head of Europe. Kenney was largely responsible for the expansion of DLR’s footprint internationally, and Stephen led many of those initiatives throughout EMEA. 

Global Compute has already agreed to acquire ATM S.A. , a leading data center and communications infrastructure business in Poland from a consortium of funds managed by MCI Capital.

“Goldman Sachs is the perfect partner for us as we pursue global investment opportunities in the data infrastructure space,” according to Scott Peterson, CEO of Global Compute. “Our combined global pedigrees and networks, together with GS MBD’s access to ample growth capital, will allow the Global Compute platform to not only serve the critical needs of our customers around the world, but also create and unlock value for our partners. Our initial investment in ATM S.A. is an ideal illustration of this collaboration. We are extremely enthusiastic about our partnership with Goldman Sachs enabling us to provide creative solutions for our global customers.”

“We are incredibly excited about partnering with Scott and the Global Compute team,” said Leonard Seevers, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. “We see a tremendous opportunity in the data center space driven by increasing computing and storage demand and we believe the Global Compute team, backed by the global resources of Goldman Sachs, is uniquely positioned to deliver world class solutions to meet that demand.”