LONDON: 3i Infrastructure plc has agreed to invest c.€300m to acquire a majority stake in Lefdal Mine Datacenter (“LMD”), a high-quality Norwegian data centre campus.
LMD is an operating data centre campus based on the west coast of Norway, with 37 MW operational capacity across its customer base, and a further 43 MW of contracted capacity currently under construction, providing an attractive earnings growth outlook. The company benefits from long-term, availability-based inflation-linked contracts, providing strong revenue visibility and protection. Customer stickiness is reinforced by their substantial capital investment in hardware and bespoke infrastructure, creating high switching costs.
The company benefits from Norway’s low-cost and robust power supply, and the company leverages its underground location and closed-loop seawater cooling technology to deliver superior efficiency. LMD has substantial future growth potential, with only one of its six mine levels currently utilised for datacentre capacity.
LMD is being acquired from a fund managed by Columbia Threadneedle Investments. The largest investor in that fund will be reinvesting alongside 3i Infrastructure. A small portfolio of operating renewable assets is also being acquired as part of this transaction. 3i Investments plc, the Company’s Investment Manager, will control the overall investment, which will total c.€400m.
Bernardo Sottomayor, Managing Partner and Head of European Infrastructure, 3i Investments plc, Investment Manager of the Company, commented:
“We are delighted to be redeploying some of the proceeds from the TCR exit into a high-quality asset like LMD. This transaction offers an attractive risk/return profile, whilst further diversifying our portfolio into a new subsector. The contracted existing capacity provides strong downside protection, and we see attractive growth opportunities to create value. We look forward to working with the management team to deliver a strong outcome for 3iN.”
Completion is expected in summer 2026.
Careful consideration is given to capital allocation decisions when reinvesting the proceeds of €1,140 million expected from the TCR realisation previously announced on 5 March. After fully repaying drawings on the Company’s revolving credit facility, and funding further growth in existing portfolio companies, this acquisition redeploys part of these proceeds in a new portfolio company. This investment diversifies the portfolio and is expected to be clearly accretive to the Company’s target return.
To provide greater flexibility in the timing of making new investment commitments prior to receiving proceeds from the realisation of TCR, the Company has activated the £300 million accordion in its revolving credit facility bringing total committed credit facilities to £1.2 billion.