PE firm Carlyle invests $235 mn in Airtel subsidiary Nxtra Data

American private equity major Carlyle Group said it has invested $235 million in Bharti Airtel’s data centre business Nxtra Data for a 25% stake in the company. 

The investment, made through Carlyle Group-managed, CAP V Mauritius-owned fund Comfort Investments II, values Nxtra at $1.2 billion, post money. The Sunil Bharti Mittal-owned telecom company will continue to hold the remaining 75% stake in the subsidiary.

Delhi headquartered Nxtra will deploy the capital to scale its infrastructure and offerings across the country, a statement issued by the company said.

“Rapid digitisation has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centres in India, and we plan to accelerate our investments to become a major player in this segment,” Gopal Vittal, managing director and CEO of Bharti Airtel, said in the statement.

Nxtra offers data centre services to customers across enterprises, startups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as government bodies. The company currently has 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres in India, offering co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery and remote infrastructure management services. 

The company has also commissioned a new data centre in Pune and plans to set up more in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata too, the statement said.

“Airtel, with its proven track record of solid execution and customer focus, is well positioned to leverage the potential growth of data centres in India. We look forward to collaborating with Airtel to unlock the full potential of Nxtra,” Neeraj Bharadwaj, managing director of Carlyle Asia Partners, said.

As of March 31, the NASDAQ-listed multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services company has invested $2.5 billion in India. It acquired a 74% stake in pure-play animal healthcare company SeQuent Scientific in May and has also backed logistics company Delhivery, SBI Card, SBI Life and HDFC.

The firm, which has $217 billion worth of assets under management globally, has also funded New York Stock Exchange-listed data centre CoreSite Realty.