The Carlyle Group will acquire around 25 per cent stake in Airtel's data centre business 'Nxtra' for $235 million. The post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is around $1.2 billion and Carlyle will hold a stake of approximately 25 per cent in the business upon completion of the transaction, with Airtel continuing to hold the remaining stake of around 75 per cent, Airtel said in a statement.

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"Bharti Airtel and Comfort Investments II, an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius Limited, an investment fund managed and advised by affiliated entities of The Carlyle Group today announced an agreement under which Comfort Investments II will invest $235 million in Nxtra Data Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Airtel engaged in the data centre business," it said.

The transaction is subject to the necessary regulatory approvals, including approval from the Competition Commission of India.

Headquartered in New Delhi, Nxtra from Airtel offers secure data centre services to leading Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments.

Nxtra's nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres provides customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.

Nxtra is building multiple large data centres across the country to capture the significant growth opportunities in India. Last year, the Company commissioned a state of the art data centre in Pune and is building more across Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. Nxtra will use the proceeds from this transaction to continue scaling up its infrastructure and offerings across the country.

Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India and South Asia), Bharti Airtel, commented: "At Airtel, we have built a robust data centre portfolio that is future ready and scalable. For us, the security and data privacy requirements of our customers are our top priorities, which we have established as a key differentiator for our data centre offerings."

He added that rapid digitisation has opened up a massive growth opportunity for data centres in India and we plan to accelerate our investments to become a major player in this segment.

"We are delighted to have Carlyle as a strategic partner in this exciting journey, particularly given their experience in this industry, and look forward to working with them," Vittal added.

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Neeraj Bharadwaj, Managing Director of the Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team, commented: "India is set to become one of the largest markets in the world for digital services. Airtel, with its proven track record of solid execution and customer focus, is well positioned to leverage the potential growth of data centres in India. We look forward to collaborating with Airtel to unlock the full potential of Nxtra."