Less than a decade after launching AirTrunk, Robin Khuda is building data centres on a scale once unimaginable — and says the next decade’s AI infrastructure build-out will be “the biggest gold rush in human history”.
AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda is set to announce a one-gigawatt data centre in the Asia Pacific in what would be one of the largest such centres in the world.
Backstage at the Forbes Australia Business Summit, Khuda said he could not say where it would be.
By way of context, he told the summit that the largest data centre in Australia in 2016 when he was trying to pitch his first 100-megawatt data centre was just 15 megawatts. This new one would be 66 times larger.
The largest data centre in the world is reported to be Switch in Tahoe, Nevada, at 650 megawatts.
“This is the biggest single biggest gold rush in human history. It’s going to generate so much wealth for everyone.”
AirTrunk founder and CEO Robin Khuda
AirTrunk announced last month that it had done a deal with Saudi Arabia to build a US$3 billion data centre “campus” in in the Middle Eastern kingdom.
The size of that campus has not been announced. Khuda said the one-gigawatt site would be in APAC.
AirTrunk currently runs 11 data centres in five countries. Its next build will be in India. But Khuda says there will be more announcements coming out of the Middle East.
He said the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had three trillion US dollars, and others in the oil-rich region could not be ignored.
“There’s a lot of capital in the Middle East. They’re going through a transformation because they know they need to transit out of oil … They’re going to be massive users of AI infrastructure because they can see AI will give them a competitive advantage.
“To us, AirTrunk, that will be a huge opportunity.”
He said the Saudi deal came through AirTrunk’s co-owner, Blackstone, which has good relationships in the region. Khuda was launched into the billionaire class when he did one of the largest private equity deals in Australia’s history last year to sell most of AirTrunk in a $24 billion buyout.
“If you read the commentaries … the Saudi government, their mission to become the third largest AI house after US and China, and they publicly said they wanted to deploy 6.6 gigawatt capacity. So if we translate 6.6 gigawatts into dollar terms, that’s over US$100 billion.
“We can see this is very attractive for us. They’re investing US$3 billion on day one, but we can see they’re going to deploy billions of dollars of capital over time.”
Khuda was born in Bangladesh and came to Australia as an international student in the late 1990s. He said Australian companies should be looking more closely at the whole South Asia and Middle East markets.
“I think there is a huge opportunity for Australia … These are the regions that will shape the future of our prosperity.”
He said the opportunity was “mind-blowing”, and that AirTrunk would likely blow past the $100 billion mark in the near future, but he found it impossible to nominate a more precise number.
“I don’t think anyone knows exactly how big this opportunity would be, but this is transformational. The way I see AI, this is the biggest single biggest gold rush in human history. It’s going to generate so much wealth for everyone.”
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