Name: Softbank to buy data center firm DigitalBridge
Uploaded: 2025-12-29T18:22:37.302Z
Duration: 3 min 32 s
Description: CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos reports on SoftBank’s acquisition of DigitalBridge for $4 billion.

CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos reports on SoftBank’s acquisition of DigitalBridge for $4 billion.

SoftBank has agreed to acquire DigitalBridge, a data center management firm with $108 billion in assets, for $4 billion in an all-cash deal at $16 per share. The acquisition is part of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's strategy to secure immediate AI infrastructure capacity, following delays in the company's own data center projects.

The deal comes amid a broader trend of major technology and investment companies acquiring existing data center assets to meet the growing demand for AI computing power. SoftBank will benefit from DigitalBridge's current leases and gain access to additional capacity as these leases expire, positioning the company for future expansion in the AI sector.

Softbank to buy data center firm DigitalBridge

SoftBank announcing a deal in the data center space today. Cristina Partsanevelis has the details in today's Tech Check segment. Cristina. Sarah, like you mentioned, they're buying a data center firm called Digital Bridge for $4 billion. That's 16 bucks a share, all cash. The stock, you can see, jumping almost 10% today on the news. Digital Bridge manages about $108 billion worth of data center assets, and this deal is basically SoftBank's founder, Masayoshi Son, saying, quote, I need an AI infrastructure and I need it now. That's to your impatient comments, Sarah, before the commercial. And so Son recently sold nearly $6 billion worth of NVIDIA stock to free up cash for AI infrastructure spending. At a forum in Tokyo at the end of November, Son said he was, quote, crying about having to sell his NVIDIA stake. That's how badly he wants to own physical data center infrastructure at the layer level. He's liquidating his chip exposure to buy the data centers that house the chips. Remember, Son already announced this massive $500 billion data center product called Stargate with OpenAI and Oracle earlier this year, but that's been moving more slowly than expected. So instead of waiting around to build new facilities, SoftBank's just buying what already exists. And SoftBank's far from alone. BlackRock and Microsoft are closing a $40 billion deal for Align data centers. That'll be the biggest data center acquisition ever. Blackstone bought Airtrunk for roughly $16 billion. That's Asia-Pacific's largest hyperscaler data center provider. Google just grabbed data center provider Intersect for nearly $5 billion. Amazon even bought a nuclear-powered data center plant center, I should say, in Pennsylvania for $650 million. So what's driving all of this? AI needs enormous amount of computing power. Building new data centers takes years. There's tons of road red tape. You got to get the labor. So everyone's just scrambling to lock up existing capacity before someone else does. It's basically a land grab, except the land is server space, Sarah. Christina, ostensibly, though, these data centers already at DigitalBridge have tenants that are using the compute that's already there. Just trying to fully understand what it is that SoftBank is getting out of it, other than obviously a return from the leases that are in place at DigitalBridge. So you could say that it's the return for the shorter frame of these leases, but then after that they would gain access to any type of leases that are, let's say, between five years or less. So it's an opportunity for them to get that capacity. And if you're saying five years, well, that's a far time away. Stargate is still trying to get its footing off the ground. Micron's another example where they had promised to build these AI infrastructures in Clay, New York. From the time they first announced it to when they're actually going to be done, it's a 10-year period. So there's been so many delays. So perhaps this is just a way for them to solidify more capacity, even if it's just five years away after many of these licenses and deals with current tenants expire. But that's just one guess. Right. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. And obviously, they have a huge commitment to open AI as well. You've mentioned Stargate, but when it comes to sort of capital going out from SoftBank, they still got a lot more to go to open AI as well to help, again, to build the compute. Well, SoftBank and many other companies have a lot more to go to open AI, right? All of those promises that some are, should I say, half-baked with AMD and NVIDIA, you know, making these promises, but none of them are actually set in stone in concrete contracts.

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