Infratil Jumps After 555MW CDC Data Centre Deal
Infratil (ASX:IFT) surged more than 12% today to multi-year highs after its 49.7%-owned data centre business, CDC, signed the largest data centre contract in Australia’s history, a 555-megawatt, 30-year deal with a US investment-grade customer. The scale is hard to overstate. This single contract equals around 40 per cent of all Australian data centre capacity operating in 2025, captured in one buyer. For investors who have watched Infratil drift sideways over the past year, this is the catalyst the market had been waiting for. We believe this announcement fundamentally changes the story for Infratil, shifting it from a diversified infrastructure investor with some data centre exposure into the ASX’s most direct AI infrastructure play.
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CDC Locks In 30 Years of Hyperscaler Demand in a Single Contract
What stands out about this deal is the rare combination of size and duration. The 30-year term comes with options to extend by another 20 years, and capacity will be delivered across CDC campuses already under development through FY28 and FY29. The customer is an unnamed US investment-grade buyer, and given that 555MW is the kind of capacity only a major hyperscaler consumes at this scale (think Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta), the credit quality of the counterparty is effectively bulletproof.
That matters because long-duration contracts are only as good as the customer signing them. With this deal locked in, CDC’s total contracted capacity now exceeds 1 gigawatt, more than doubling overnight. The implication for shareholders is significant: this is locked-in cashflow visibility that very few ASX companies can claim. The question for investors now shifts from “Can CDC win the demand?” to “Can CDC deliver on time?”
A Three-Fold Earnings Transformation Is Now Locked In
The financial picture is what really got the market moving. CDC’s current FY27 underlying earnings (EBITDAF) guidance sits at around A$680 to A$720 million, and that figure stays unchanged because the new capacity only starts coming online from FY28. From there, management expects underlying earnings to exceed A$1 billion in FY28 before reaching roughly A$2 billion once the full contracted capacity is deployed. That is a near three-fold earnings transformation in just a few years, and it explains why the stock re-rated so sharply on the day.
Encouragingly, this growth does not come with a capital raise attached. CDC has a strong balance sheet and recently secured a Moody’s Baa2 investment-grade credit rating, which opens up cheaper global debt funding. In our view, that is the most important detail in the announcement: existing shareholders are not being diluted to fund the next leg of growth.
The Investor’s Takeaway for Infratil
Infratil’s investment case has clearly strengthened. This deal de-risks the medium-term earnings outlook, and CDC’s broader development pipeline of around 1.6GW running through 2034 suggests today’s announcement is the beginning of the run, not the peak.
That said, this is now an execution story. Building this much capacity on schedule will be capital-intensive, and any slippage on FY28 to FY29 timelines could quickly cool sentiment. We believe Infratil looks attractive for long-term growth investors comfortable with capital-intensive infrastructure timelines, but those chasing near-term upside may find the wait challenging.
