Kakao Data Center to Be Sold from Aegis to Macquarie

Global infrastructure investment manager Macquarie has moved to acquire the Kakao data center.

According to the investment banking (IB) industry on the 20th, Aegis Asset Management recently selected Macquarie Asset Management as the preferred bidder for the sale of the Kakao data center in Hanam. Macquarie Asset Management plans to incorporate the data center through its listed infrastructure fund, Macquarie Infrastructure.

Aegis Asset Management put this asset, located at 607-2 and 3 Pungsan-dong, Hanam-si, Gyeonggi-do, on the market last year. Subsequently, JLL Korea was appointed as the sales advisor to commence the sale in earnest.

Aegis Asset Management directly developed the data center through its fund. Samsung C&T was responsible for construction, and LG CNS handled the data center design and operation. The real estate trustee is Woori Bank.

The data center is leased 92% by Kakao and 8% by LG CNS. It is interpreted that Kakao chose this location to secure disaster recovery capabilities following the Kakao outage incident in October 2022.

The real estate IB industry expects the sale price of the Hanam data center to range from 800 billion KRW to over 1 trillion KRW. The asset consists of two basement floors to ten above-ground floors, with a total floor area of 41,919.4 square meters. The total capacity is 40 MW (megawatts), with an IT load capacity of 25.44 MW.

Data centers have been considered one of the promising investment destinations in the real estate market due to increasing server demand. However, active transactions have not occurred due to rising construction costs caused by high interest rates and lack of acquisition funds.

With Macquarie Asset Management entering the domestic data center transaction market for the first time, the industry expects data center transactions to become more active in the future.

Headquartered in Australia, Macquarie Group has extensive experience in infrastructure investment. In 2020, it demonstrated its commitment to data center investment by acquiring the data platform AirTrunk through its Asia Infrastructure Fund.

Macquarie Asset Management has incorporated high-quality domestic infrastructure assets through Macquarie Infrastructure. In July last year, it secured a 48% stake in CNC Energy, which supplies city gas to Daejeon Metropolitan City and Gyeryong, Chungnam Province. The total investment amount was 183.2 billion KRW.

Additionally, it has invested in major infrastructure assets such as the Dongbu Expressway underground privatization project and the Cheonan-Nonsan Expressway. To date, Macquarie Infrastructure has invested approximately 2.7 trillion KRW in domestic infrastructure projects.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.