Digital Realty To Acquire Ascenty In Brazil; Deal Valued At Approx. $1.8 Bln

(RTTNews) - Digital Realty (DLR) announced its Brazilian subsidiary, Stellar Participações Ltda., has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Ascenty, a data center provider in Brazil, from private equity firm Great Hill Partners in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion. Ascenty is one of Latin America's largest data center providers with 14 data centers in operation and/or under construction. Digital Realty expects the Ascenty acquisition to be initially dilutive to financial metrics but to be accretive to financial metrics over the intermediate term and accretive to long-term growth rate.

Digital Realty has separately entered into an independent bilateral equity commitment letter with Brookfield Infrastructure, an affiliate of Brookfield Asset Management, under which Brookfield has committed to fund half of the required initial equity investment, currently estimated to be approximately $613 million, excluding Brookfield's share of the transaction costs, in exchange for 49% of the total equity interests in a joint venture entity expected to ultimately own Ascenty.

Digital Realty has commenced an underwritten registered public offering of 8.5 million shares of its common stock. The company expects to enter into forward sale agreements with Bank of America, and Citibank. Digital Realty intends to contribute the net proceeds, if any, it receives upon the future settlement of the forward sale agreements to its operating partnership, which intends to subsequently use a portion of such net proceeds to fund its portion of the previously-announced pending acquisition of Ascenty.

Separately, Digital Realty announced it has reached an agreement to acquire 424 acres of undeveloped land in Loudoun County, Virginia for a total purchase price of $236.5 million. The site is adjacent to Washington Dulles International Airport and located near bulk transmission lines as well as a major fiber path. The site is also located less than four miles from Digital Realty's existing data center campuses in Ashburn, Virginia.