Japan’s SoftBank announced on Monday that it has agreed to acquire data center investment firm DigitalBridge for $4 billion as part of its artificial intelligence initiative.
The agreement, unanimously endorsed by a special committee of the DigitalBridge board of directors, will involve SoftBank’s acquisition of all outstanding DigitalBridge common stock at $16 per share in cash.
However, this constitutes a 15 percent premium to the closing share price of DigitalBridge on December 26. According to a statement from SoftBank, the deal is expected to be closed during the second half of next year.
SoftBank CEO and Chairman Masayoshi Son stated that the acquisition “will strengthen the foundation for next-generation AI data centers” and advance the company’s vision to become a leading “Artificial Super Intelligence” platform provider.
In a statement, he said, “As AI transforms industries worldwide, we need more compute, connectivity, power, and scalable infrastructure.”
Therefore, the DigitalBridge shares increased by approximately 10 percent. The share price of the firm had risen up to 50 percent following Bloomberg announcement that a deal might be on the verge of being imminent.
The deal between the Japanese firm SoftBank and DigitalBridge follows a worldwide surge in the infrastructure that supports AI applications.
DigitalBridge CEO Marc Ganzi added in a statement that “The buildout of AI infrastructure represents one of the most significant investment opportunities of our generation.”
He reported that SoftBank’s “vision, capital strength, and global network will allow us to accelerate our mission with greater flexibility, invest with a longer-term horizon on behalf of our investors, and better serve the world’s leading technology companies as they scale their AI ambitions.”
Recently, SoftBank divested all of its stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia at a valuation of $5.83 billion to clear space to invest in OpenAI.
As per the website, DigitalBridge refers to itself as “a unique digital infrastructure business,” and it had approximately $108 billion of assets under management as of the end of September.
