Real estate dynamo David Di Pilla’s HMC Capital has pulled off Australia’s biggest new public company listing in years, fuelled by investors wanting to tap into the explosive growth of AI-driven data centres.
HMC’s well-publicised initial public offering, the DigiCo REIT, will begin trading on the Australian stock exchange on December 12 at a market capitalisation of $2.74 billion after securing underwriting from banks and other big investors.
David Di Pilla sees strong growth prospects in the US for the new DigiCo REIT.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
Such was the enthusiasm among underwriters for the new digital infrastructure property trust that its capitalisation was upsized by $100 million to cater for demand.
“That reflects the quality of the underlying assets and the desire of investors to get exposure to the digital sector, clearly something that’s hard to get high-quality exposure to,” Da Pilla said.
The global growth of ChatGPT, video made on Synthesys and other AI applications is not just turbocharging the fortunes for the world’s biggest companies such as Nvidia, Amazon and Alphabet, but is also benefiting property firms that manage and lease data centres, where megawatts of information are stored and served up to the cloud.
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A data centre’s capacity is measured in megawatts because of the huge amount of energy needed to power its servers and cooling systems.
The sector’s value became evident in September when AirTrunk founder Robin Khuda, and co-owner Macquarie, clinched the sale of his nine-year-old data centre business to US investment giant Blackstone in a deal worth $23.5 billion, cementing Khuda’s billionaire status.
Morgan Stanley recently upped its 2030 energy consumption forecasts for Australia’s data centres by 700 megawatts to 3200 megawatts, a considerable uptick from the 2 per cent of electricity they consume now to about 8 per cent of the country’s total generation in six years’ time.
