Macquarie is set for a huge windfall

According to the AFR, AirTrunk is coming close to a $15 billion exit.

If you’re anything like me, you probably haven’t even heard about AirTrunk. Raising their first round of capital in 2017, an eye-watering $400 million, they’ve quickly grown to what is set to be a monumental exit opportunity.

So, what does AirTrunk do, and why should you care?

Here’s the story:

What is AirTrunk?

AirTrunk is a hyperscale data centre specialist, developing what is essentially large campuses with buildings filled with tens of thousands of servers. These centre’s house the data required for on-demand services, think Google Drive, Netflix and, more recently, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

AirTrunk’s has three data centres around Sydney, which made me think about why they would choose to build it on such expensive land. Turns out user proximity matters for the data centres. For things like stock trading, latency matters down to the millisecond and the further the data centre the greater the latency. For things like streaming media, streaming gigabytes of data across the country is extremely inefficient.

AirTrunk completed their first round in 2017 and they couldn’t have timed the market better.

Corporates have been slowly transitioning to the cloud over the past decade but when Covid hit this became a necessity. As everyone transitioned to working from home, companies didn’t have the infrastructure required to house their data and so they looked to outsource to cloud operators like Google or Microsoft. This spike in demand led to a greater need for AirTrunk’s hyperscale data centres.