Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is investing US$1.75-billion ($2.4-billion) to back a strategy led by Swedish-based EQT Group to build artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The deal increases the exposure the country’s largest pension fund has been accumulating to the physical assets that underpin AI, which are being built at breakneck speed.
The funding will be channeled to projects led by EdgeConneX, a data-centre developer and operator that EQT acquired in 2020.
Since then, EdgeConneX has increased its capacity by roughly 20 times and expanded its footprint to more than 20 countries. And it has plans to build more than 10 gigawatts of data centres in the coming years - facilities drawing enough energy to power millions of individual homes.
“Through this investment alongside EQT, we are increasing our exposure to a sector supported by durable, long-term demand drivers,” CPPIB’s global head of real assets, Max Biagosch, said in a statement.
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The transaction has received customary approvals and has closed, CPPIB said Friday.
CPPIB manages and invests the Canada Pension Plan’s funds on behalf of more than 22 million plan members and beneficiaries. It has $793.3-billion of assets under management, as of March 31.
The pension fund manager has built its digital infrastructure portfolio through investments and partnerships in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
Investors’ confidence in AI and semiconductor stocks has wobbled lately, raising questions about whether the sector is inflating a speculative bubble that will outpace real-world demand.
But some leading global CEOs have continued to predict that the scale of AI investments needed to meet global demand for the technology will continue to prop up economic growth and push stock markets to higher levels.
CPPIB said in its statement that it has tried to focus its investments in high-quality companies in markets that are expected to have strong, long-term demand.
Already this year, CPPIB has partnered with digital infrastructure company Equinix Inc. to buy Nordic data-centre provider atNorth for US$4-billion including debt, and committed up to $1-billion to a partnership with CtrlS Datacenters Ltd. in India.
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Since 2024, CPPIB has made several large-scale investments in the AI sector, including a previous US$15-billion joint venture with Equinix, a US$1.3-billion commitment to a data centre development fund led by Ares Management, and a $225-million loan to an AI computing development in Cambridge, Ont.
Earlier this week, Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. BAM-T and U.S.-based Bloom Energy Corp. BE-N announced a five-fold expansion of an existing partnership to finance power projects to support AI infrastructure.
The companies now expect to invest US$25-billion to speed up global deployment of Bloom’s fuel cells, a technology that uses a chemical reaction involving hydrogen to generate clean energy with low emissions, without needing access to existing power grids.