One of the largest private investment companies in the world is making a big new bet on data centres.‍

What’s happening:‍

• Florida based private investment company Starwood Capital has publicly announced their plans to expand their focus on building new data centres capable of powering cloud computing and GPUs for artificial intelligence workloads
  
• The new endeavour will be called Starwood Digital Ventures and will collaborate closely with Worldwide Mission Critical, one of North America's leading companies focused on data centre design, development and construction
  

By the numbers:‍

• Starwood Capital has approximately $115B USD in assets under management across their various investments and holdings in public markets and real estate
  
• Starwood currently already has $8B USD invested into existing data centres globally
  
• Between all their existing data centres, Starwood currently has a total of 1.5 gigawatts of computing capacity
  

Why it matters:‍

• Data centres have become more relevant than ever with the recent monumental rise of artificial intelligence startups requiring significant computing power to train large language models and generative AI workloads
  
• Starwood is already one of the largest privately held data centre developers in the world and their new venture will likely significantly accelerate their capital investment into expanding data centre infrastructure across North America and Europe
  

Going deeper:‍

• Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) also recently announced a $1B USD investment into building a new data centre in the United Kingdom
  
• Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has also been making big moves to expand their data centres globally, including a planned €2.5B investment into new infrastructure in the United Kingdom to focus on ramping up their artificial intelligence computing power

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