Wolf Theiss advises AustralianSuper on its €1.5 billion investment to acquire a significant minority stake in Vantage Data Centers Europe, Middle East and Africa (Vantage EMEA)

Vienna, 13 September 2023 – Wolf Theiss has advised Australia’s largest pension fund AustralianSuper on its €1.5 billion investment to acquire a significant minority stake in Vantage Data Centers Europe, Middle East and Africa (Vantage EMEA), a DigitalBridge-sponsored company.

This investment marks AustralianSuper’s first significant exposure in hyperscale data centres and allows the fund to access an attractive market with strong growth prospects.

The Wolf Theiss core team was led by Peter Daszkowski (Partner, Corporate / M&A) and Sarah Wared (Partner, Corporate / M&A), and included Marcin Rudnik (Counsel, IP&IT), Jakub Pietrasik (Counsel, IP/IT), Joanna Gasowski (Counsel, Banking & Finance), Zuzanna Nowak-Wrobel (Associate, Corporate / M&A), Michal Zajaczkowski (Senior Associate, Real Estate), Olga Gerlich (Senior Associate, Litigation) and Lukas Ploesch (Senior Associate, Corporate/ M&A).

Herbert Smith Freehills LLP acted as lead counsel to AustralianSuper.

“We are proud to advise AustralianSuper in this strategically important investment, as data center demand continues to rapidly accelerate across Europe”, commented Sarah Wared, Wolf Theiss Partner.

“This investment was complex and multi-jurisdictional and therefore a perfect fit for the Wolf Theiss Team”, added Peter Daszkowski, Wolf Theiss Partner.

AustralianSuper is Australia’s largest pension fund, managing more than €180 billion in members’ retirement savings on behalf of more than 3.2 million members from more than 448,000 businesses. AustralianSuper has an infrastructure portfolio of more than €24 billion with investments primarily in developed markets that target large direct ownership stakes across the infrastructure spectrum.

Vantage Data Centers powers, cools, protects and connects the technology of the world’s leading hyperscalers, cloud providers and large enterprises.   Operating across North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, Vantage has evolved data centre design in innovative ways to be able to deliver dramatic gains with respect to reliability, efficiency and sustainability in flexible environments with a scalability that is on par with market demand.