Robin Khuda was an 18-year-old looking to continue his accountancy training when he moved from Bangladesh to Australia a quarter of a century ago.
Today his own balance sheet has never looked healthier. AirTrunk, a data centre company that Khuda founded nine years ago, was sold to Blackstone this week in a A$24bn (US$16bn) deal after a bidding war that produced one of the largest takeovers of an Australian company.
The acquisition cements Khuda as one of a select group of Australian tech billionaires and caps a quick rise for AirTrunk, a pan-Asian business that has soared in value as the growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing creates fortunes from digital infrastructure.
Macquarie, the Sydney-based asset manager, acquired an 88 per cent stake in 2020 that valued the data centre company at A$3bn. It was linked with a potential A$10bn float last year but was instead put up for sale this year as demand from private equity and infrastructure funds for data centre assets continued to grow.
Khuda and other staff have also sold part of their 12 per cent stake as part of the Blackstone deal, but the 44-year-old will stay on as chief executive and is expected to retain a stake of about 5 per cent.
“In under a decade, we’ve built the largest platform in the region, with data centres in all major markets operating as essential digital infrastructure underpinning the digital economy,” he said in a statement. “For AirTrunk, this is just the beginning.”
The deal would also represent a “watershed” for the burgeoning Asian start-up scene in Australia, raising its profile with investors, said Sandeep Varma, chief executive of Saari Collective, a media company that has worked with Khuda.
Khuda, who studied accounting at the University of Technology Sydney after arriving in Australia, worked in the telecoms and cloud computing businesses for companies including Singtel and Fujitsu before becoming chief financial officer of Pipe Networks, a business looking to build a subsea fibre cable between Sydney and Guam.
He then became finance director of NextDC, a data centre company now valued at almost A$10bn on Australia’s stock exchange. Overseeing its listing brought Khuda into the orbit of investors but tested his willingness to work for someone else rather than strike out on his own.
Matthew Haupt of Wilson Asset Management, a NextDC shareholder at the time, said it was clear Khuda had his eye on bigger things. “You could tell he had a desire to succeed. It almost felt like a transitional role. He had that drive,” he said. “Even so, it’s hard to believe he’s got to where he has.”
In 2014, Khuda was appointed as chief executive of telecoms payments company Mint Wireless but lasted only six months before the struggling company’s co-founder retook the reins.
It was the catalyst for Khuda to go out on his own by founding AirTrunk, but he failed to get financing within Australia, leading him to dip into his personal pension to fund salaries, according to one former colleague. His first contracts were aggressively priced, according to one person with knowledge of the company’s earliest days.
Varma noted that Khuda’s previous jobs had steeped him in the industry. “He gained insight into the problem he was trying to solve. He positioned himself to become a rocket ship,” Varma said.
The former colleague said Khuda, a cricket fan who also supports the Sydney Swans football team, had shown loyalty to staff, known as “AirTrunkers”, and established a top floor office in northern Sydney, with impressive harbour views and free food for employees.
AirTrunk’s strategy under Khuda was to look beyond Australia and build giant data centres across Asia capable of supporting large technology companies such as Microsoft.
Its empire of 11 so-called hyperscale data centres stretches across markets including Malaysia, Japan and India, where forecasts of rapid growth in AI and cloud computing have attracted the likes of Macquarie and now Blackstone.
The private equity group, which already has a $55bn portfolio of data centres, said after striking the deal that it expected a further $1tn of capital expenditure on data centres outside the US in the next five years.
Khuda was one of 18 Australian business leaders who attended a roundtable discussion with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited the country in 2023 — when he set out the case for how digital infrastructure was needed to underpin the rapid digitisation of Asian economies.
The vision to grow a regional company reflected Khuda’s perspective as an outsider in Australia, where the entire population of 27mn is the equivalent of a large city in Asia, said Varma of Saari Collective.
“Of course he realised he could take this bigger,” he said. “He had the ambition to serve all those people and could see a pathway to do something that others [in the sector] weren’t doing.”
Khuda marked the Blackstone deal with a post on LinkedIn, which noted that he had built a company with 350 staff and “not a single salesperson”, and said he would work with AirTrunk’s new owners to make it a A$100bn plus business. “We’ve only just begun,” he wrote.
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