Australia’s Goodman Group establishes a $2.7 billion fund to invest in data centres in Hong Kong.

Australia’s Goodman Group announced on Friday the formation of a $2.7 billion investment consortium with global pension funds and investors to create data centre operations in Hong Kong.

The industrial property group announced its collaboration with Dutch investors PGGM and APG, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Indirect Private Real Estate Strategies from CBRE Investment Management. It mentioned that a Middle Eastern investor, who remains unnamed, was also part of the deal. Goodman announced in a statement that it will be a 20% cornerstone investor in the partnership.

The group will possess four current Hong Kong data centres owned by Goodman in an industrial partnership and two centres that are in the process of being developed. Goodman’s portfolio comprises about 30% of the power capacity in Hong Kong’s data centre market, it stated.

Goodman, which has comparable data center partnerships in Europe and Japan, stated that the Japanese division will possess $1.1 billion in assets by the close of 2025.

Goodman possesses an industrial property portfolio in Hong Kong worth A$10 billion ($6.57 billion), a portion of which may be transformed into data centres later, according to Chief Executive Greg Goodman.

“There’s opportunities in the industrial portfolio. We have to basically redevelop them into data centres and they would then come into this partnership for development,” Goodman told in a telephone interview.

“There’s a lot of inquiry now coming out of China, you’ve seen a big push in artificial intelligence in China. China is on a big growth path in regard to digital evolution and the whole AI sector. So you can expect a lot of Chinese operators also very interested in Hong Kong.”