SoftBank Purchasing Data Center Firm for $4B

A data center investment firm formerly operated by ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack is being sold to one of the biggest names in investment management.

Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank agreed to acquire DigitalBridge for $4 billion, CNBC reported. The deal, already unanimously approved by a special committee at DigitalBridge, is expected to close in the second half of next year.

SoftBank will acquire all of DigitalBridge’s outstanding stock for $16 per share. That’s a 15 percent premium on the stock’s closing price at the end of last week.

In a statement, Son said the deal “will strengthen the foundation for next-generation AI data centers.”

DigitalBridge was once known as Colony Capital, founded by Barrack in the 1990s. The company pivoted its investment strategy over the last few years, gearing its portfolio towards digital infrastructure, including data centers.

As of the end of the third quarter, DigitalBridge has $108 billion in assets under management. The firm counts more than 5.4 gigawatts of data center capacity in development or in operation, according to an August report from Data Center Dynamics, including the investment in DataBank, operating 73 data centers in 26 markets.

Seemingly every big name in tech or real estate has looked to get in on the data center development race as artificial intelligence forces the hand of many hyperscalers hoping to keep up. Anthropic recently committed $50 billion to build its own AI data center campuses across the United States, including sites expected in Texas and New York.

SoftBank is not sitting out of the race. The company is one of the members of a joint venture — alongside OpenAI, Oracle and MGX — that was part of the launch of Stargate at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term.

The venture, chaired by Son, plans to spend up to $500 billion in infrastructure needed for AI growth by the end of this decade.

— Holden Walter-Warner