Cool Vector

Ardian's very first investment in a data center company shows it is "quite convinced on the AI opportunity in Europe," says Pauline Thomson, Head of Data Science and a Managing Director at the $176 billion investment firm ⁠ Ardian⁠ . In a Cool Vector interview, Thomson describers the thesis behind Ardian's $1.2 billion investment in Verne, an Iceland-based, green data center company with pan-Nordi...

The data center industry is uniquely positioned to integrate workers from a broad array of backgrounds, which is good news, given the rapid aging of the industry's original workforce. According to three veterans of the industry, more needs to be done to elevate awareness of careers in data centers among workers in other industries, as well as among young people raised in a digital world, but unawa...

David Capobianco's company, ⁠LandBridge⁠ , owns 270,000 surface acres in West Texas, and he's pleased to explain why the land's profitability has tripled in three years. The reason has to do with data centers. LandBridge is a publicly traded affiliate of Five Point Energy, of which Capobianco is CEO. The company's share price is being carefully watched by investors looking for evidence of a new pa...

Private equity firm ⁠Actis⁠ is building data centers around the world while maintaining strict standards around sustainable energy, water and social impact. And the firm's impact is about to get bigger. Actis and General Atlantic recently merged to create an $87 billion investment platform, with Actis focused on the huge opportunity in sustainable infrastructure, largely in growth markets across A...

Data center real estate investment trusts (REITs), like Equinix and Digital Realty Trust, differ from traditional REITs in their higher operational intensity and reliance on artificial-intelligence tailwinds for growth, says Harold Chen, Director of Commercial Real Estate at Fitch Ratings . Chen, whose team has assigned investment-grade ratings to Equinix and Digital Realty, says the companies ben...

"I kid you not. . . at least once a week, I've got a conversation going with somebody who sits in digital infrastructure private equity, and they say to me, 'If you know somebody, or a team, that does XYZ in the data center space, let me know. I'd love to meet them, because that is the type of business model that we could put hundreds of millions, if not not billions, into.'"   The amount of priva...

Partners Group was already bullish on AI when, in 2022, the firm invested $1.2 billion in EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure. Then the debut of ChatGPT a few weeks later blew to lid off their initial assumptions of growth. In the post-ChatGPT world, the hyperscaler market served by EdgeCore saw an "explosion of demand for capacity," says Diffendal who, in a wide-ranging interview, explains the critic...

A conversation with Omar Jaffrey, founder of digital infrastructure private capital firm ⁠Palistar Capital⁠ , which is currently investing from a $1.9 billion fund. Jaffrey gives a grand tour through the digital infrastructure investment opportunity, in which he says builders of scale will have advantages in winning customers. He cautions that some investors confuse the full stack of technology, s...

John Siegel, a Partner at private equity firm Columbia Capital, offers a deep dive into the physical assets necessary to power an AI-driven internet, including the fiber optic cables that connect the growing population of data centers around the world, and the nations jockeying for position to build digital infrastructure hubs. In a wide-ranging conversation, John shares his views on the demand dr...

Digital infrastructure has a voracious appetite for energy, but the electric utility industry is filled with apprehension and lacks 'muscle memory' to 'build big things,' according to Brian Janous, co-founder of sustainable energy specialist Cloverleaf Infrastructure, as well as the former head of data center energy for Microsoft. In a wide-ranging interview with Cool Vector, Janous describes how...

Financial journalist David Snow introduces Cool Vector, a new video-podcast that will chart the rise of data centers and the digital infrastructure asset class. On a regular basis, Cool Vector will convene expert conversations about the role that institutional investment capital will play in the build-out of digital infrastructure around the world, and focus on the overlapping long-term trends of...