Macquarie-backed, Australian-headquartered data centre giant AirTrunk has struck a major renewable energy deal in Hong Kong, backed by thousands of solar sites in Hong Kong’s New Territories region.
The deal comes as power use by energy-hungry data centres is forecast to surge, propelled higher by the rise of artificial intelligence applications. Governments and regulators around the globe including in Australia are scrambling toThe extra demand, coupled with the push for higher sustainability standards across the corporate world, puts major data centres operators such as AirTrunk at the forefront of the decarbonisation effort.
In Hong Kong, AirTrunk has struck a renewable energy certificate procurement agreement with CLP Power, Hong Kong’s major energy utility. The arrangement will help support AirTrunk customer Microsoft’s goal of achieving 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025. The renewable generation will come from more than 200 megawatts of capacity in total, installed at solar sites across 17,000 locations in Hong Kong’s New Territories of Hong Kong, AirTrunk said.opening a data room for potential investment into its $15 billion platform of 11 data centres. Macquarie and Canada’s PSP Investments hold a combined 88 per cent stake, an interest which had a $3 billion valuation just four years ago.
Led by its founder Robin Khuda, AirTrunk is lifting the pace on its decarbonisation efforts, striking a $4.6 billion debt deal last year that is“We’re doing deals that are 10 times bigger than we used to. The cloud services transition is still happening. There are still a lot of organisations that are yet to move to the cloud.