Digital infrastructure was one of the biggest destinations for resources throughout this year. And, as 2025 draws to a close, the segment is close to reinforcing this leading role with an agreement involving a major player in the sector and one of the global investment giants.
One company that seems poised to add more digits to that account is Softbank . Led by Masayoshi Son , the Japanese conglomerate has acquired DigitalBridge, a private equity firm specializing in assets such as data centers .
The deal was closed for US$4 billion, a 15% premium over DigitalBridge's share price on December 26. The company's shares rose as much as 30% in pre-market trading on the New York Stock Exchange due to speculation surrounding the deal. Now, they are up almost 10%.
This wouldn't be the first time Softbank has made an acquisition in the world of asset management. In 2017, Softbank acquired Fortress Investment Group for over US$3 billion. Subsequently, the group sold its stake in the operation to Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund.
Now, the acquisition of DigitalBridge fits into the Japanese giant's strategy of trying to capitalize on the growing demand for computing power, driven by artificial intelligence applications. This has translated, primarily, into a wave of investments in data centers.
Softbank itself is one of the names behind these investments. In January, the company, along with Oracle and OpenAI, announced the creation of Stargate , a project to build data centers in the United States, with a projected investment of US$500 billion.
Aside from this ambition, which included a promise from Son to invest US$100 billion right from the start of the initiative, the project's development has been slower than planned due to issues such as disagreements over the location of data centers.
Three months ago, the trio behind Stargate announced plans for five new facilities in the states of Texas, New Mexico, and Ohio. The projection is that, combined, these data centers will have a capacity of 7 gigawatts of power.
Alongside these announcements, the acquisition of DigitalBridge substantially strengthens Softbank's presence in this space. Headquartered in the United States and founded in 1991 as Colony Capital, the company has $108 billion in assets under management and more than 45 companies under its umbrella.
This portfolio includes data center, fiber, and tower companies such as AIMS, AtlasEdge, DataBank, Switch, Vantage Data Centers, VerticalBridge, and Yondr Group. And this map also leaves room for the Brazilian market.
In 2019, the investment firm established a foothold in Brazil by acquiring Highline, a cell tower company that belonged to Pátria. And, a year later, it definitively placed the country on its itinerary by acquiring UD Tecnologia, UOL's data center.
The deal was estimated at between US$300 million and US$400 million. This operation was renamed Scala Data Centers and became the company's data center brand in Latin America. Today, the company has 13 data centers in operation, distributed across four Latin American countries.
(This report was updated at 2:55 PM with the completion of the deal)
