Wall Street private equity giant Blackstone launched its first-ever data centre platform, Asia Lumina CloudInfra, on Tuesday.
Owned and run by Blackstone’s Real Estate and Tactical Opportunities funds, the platform already has a couple of hyperscale data centres in India in its pipeline, according to an announcement on Tuesday. Lumina will look to expand its presence in the digital infrastructure markets across India and Asia.
The world’s largest private equity firm has poached a former Microsoft veteran, Anil Reddy, to spearhead the newly-formed company as global CEO and lead its strategy and growth across Asia. Reddy will be joined by an ex-Colt country leader for India Sujeet Deshpande, who has been appointed as CEO of the Indian business in his new role.
The establishment of the data centre platform mirrors Blackstone’s continued focus on data centres globally and its commitment to deepen its penetration in Asia, said the statement.
“Lumina is well-positioned to benefit from India’s digital transformation, supported by the combined expertise and experience of industry veterans and our Blackstone teams on the ground,” said Asheesh Mohta, head of real estate acquisitions in India for Blackstone.
“This is a unique, fully integrated platform with capabilities in development, operations, management, and leasing and adds to our strong track record of building high-quality data centre business globally and real asset portfolios of scale in India.”
Blackstone, which has over $951 billion in assets under management, has an extensive portfolio of data centres across the globe, including the digital infrastructure that it inherited from the $10-billion buyout of QT in 2021 and a sizeable portfolio of data centres in Japan, among many others.