TECH

Bigtec's look Asia to expand its AI infrastructure

The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) has seen global private equity investors and asset managers increasingly interested in making acquisitions and investments linked to data centers in Asia. The information is from Reuters.

The momentum in infrastructures to generate AI technology has called for companies to invest in more data capabilities, which has increased the pace of business in Asia.

Asia, including Japan, was the region that led dealmaking activity in the global data center market this year, with M&A value totaling US$840.47 million, more than half of the global value, data from the LSEG, British stock exchange.

The total value moved last year in Asia in business related to data centers was US$3.45 billion, also according to LSEG, and the expectation is that this number will be exceeded in 2024.

Among the large data center deals already underway, global investment firm Blackstone intends to acquire AirTrunk, which has 11 hyper-scale data centers in Australia and the rest of the Asian region.

AirTrunk's owners estimate that the deal would cost up to 15 billion Australian dollars, or US$9.8 billion. It would be the biggest data center transaction in Asia this year.

Microsoft targets Asia to expand its AI infrastructure...Last week, Microsoft claimed it would invest US$2.2 billion over the next four years in Malaysia, aiming to expand its cloud and AI services across Asia;

The increase in investments in data centers in Asia follows a similar trajectory to that observed in the USA and Europe;

In these regions, technology giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have been rapidly expanding their AI capabilities;

Microsoft's first data center on Asian soil will be in Thailand and, in addition, the company has already announced US$1.7 billion in investments in AI and cloud facilities in Indonesia.