Bharti Airtel has revealed that Carlyle Group will pick up nearly 25 percent stake in Nxtra Data, a data centre business subsidiary of Airtel, for $235 million.
The post-money enterprise valuation of Nxtra is approximately $1.2 billion. Airtel, the third largest telecom operator in India based on mobile phone subscribers, will continue to hold the remaining stake of approximately 75 percent in Nxtra Data.

Airtel is the largest player in India’s enterprise connectivity segment and serves over 2,500 large businesses and over one million medium and small businesses.

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

Nxtra has 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres providing 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 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.

Bharti Airtel’s India CEO Gopal Vittal said: “Digitization 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.”

Neeraj Bharadwaj, managing director of Carlyle Asia Partners, said: “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.”

Carlyle had invested more than $2.5 billion in India as of March 31, 2020.