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 appears willing to add more digits to that account is Softbank . Led by Masayoshi Son , the Japanese conglomerate is in advanced negotiations to buy DigitalBridge, a private equity firm specializing in assets such as data centers .
Information about these talks was released by Bloomberg , which cited sources close to the negotiations. The terms of the transaction, which could be finalized today, were not disclosed. But the possibility of an agreement boosted DigitalBridge's shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
The company's shares rose more than 30% in pre-market trading on the US stock exchange on Monday morning, December 29th. Year-to-date, the shares have appreciated by 63.4%, giving DigitalBridge a market capitalization of US$2.71 billion.
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 would fit 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 would substantially strengthen 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.
