Azrieli Group explores partner for Green Mountain data centre

The Tel Aviv-based Azrieli Group is restarting efforts to bring in a partner for its wholly owned data-centre subsidiary, Green Mountain, as demand for artificial-intelligence computing fuels a global data-centre boom, Calcalist reports. The company has hired Goldman Sachs to find a strategic investor, and the US investment bank has begun meeting potential partners in London in search of one able to inject roughly €1 billion into the business.

According to the report, Green Mountain's post-money valuation in such a deal would reach at least €5 billion, about NIS 17 billion, roughly six times the NIS 2.8 billion valuation at which Azrieli acquired the Norwegian company in 2021. Some within Azrieli hope to achieve an even higher figure. Potential investors are said to include major international institutions active in data centres, among them large private-equity firms such as CVC and Blackstone. Azrieli declined to comment.

Azrieli, controlled by the Azrieli family and chaired by Danna Azrieli, first announced its intention to bring in a partner for Green Mountain in January 2024, but the process was later frozen, in part because of concerns among some investors over a large agreement Green Mountain held with a Chinese company operating the TikTok platform. Since then, the report says, Green Mountain has expanded its customer base and reduced TikTok's relative importance within its portfolio.

The data-centre operation is overseen by Green Mountain chief executive Eyal Hankin, who served as CEO of the Azrieli Group for seven years before stepping down at the end of 2024 and moving to London to run the group's data-centre activities. Green Mountain, which operated three data centres in a single country when Azrieli bought it, today runs seven facilities across three countries.

The subsidiary has become an increasingly important growth engine for the group. When Azrieli acquired Green Mountain in 2021, its data-centre assets were valued at about NIS 1.1 billion, or roughly 3% of total assets; the report says those assets have since reached NIS 11.7 billion, about 18% of the total. Azrieli currently has a market capitalisation of about NIS 52.7 billion, making it Israel's largest income-producing real-estate company by market value.

Green Mountain's rapid expansion mirrors a broader shift that has turned data centres from a niche real-estate segment into one of the fastest-growing areas of global infrastructure investment, driven largely by demand for AI computing capacity, a trend now shaping strategy at one of Tel Aviv's largest listed companies.

Sources: calcalistech.com.

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