French private investment firm Ardian has completed the acquisition of the entire share capital of Verne, a data centre platform headquartered in the UK and diversified across Northern Europe, from investment trust Digital 9 Infrastructure (D9), in a deal worth up to £450m.
According to a stock exchange notice, London-listed D9 has received an initial £325.8m from Ardian, with the trust also set for a £19.5m deferred consideration payment and a potential earn-out payment of up to £106m, subject to Verne achieving run-rate EBITDA targets for the financial year ending December 2026.
D9 originally acquired Verne — which was founded in 2012 and operates a 24MW data centre campus on a former NATO site near Keflavik, Iceland, offering colocation and high-performance computing services — for £231m in 2021. Customers include industrials, financial services, research and AI organisations.
According to a press statement, Ardian will support the expansion of Verne with up to $1.2bn committed investment through equity and debt to deliver an growth plan for Northern Europe supported by the existing management team.
As part of its value creation strategy, Ardian plans to multiply Verne’s existing sold capacity of 29MW for 2023 by close to four times in the medium term.
Ardian currently has $31bn of AUM in direct infrastructure activities, and has $6bn deployed across different sub-sectors of digital infrastructure. Its investment portfolio of renewable energy in the Nordics currently aggregates to $3bn, notably wind parks totalling circa 500 MW and Nevel, the Finnish district heating company backed by Ardian in 2021.
