UAE property tycoon Sajwani makes $1 billion bet on data centers

UAE property tycoon Sajwani makes $1 billion bet on data centers

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Emirati property magnate Hussain Sajwani will invest $1 billion to build a global network of data centers under his recently launched Edgnex venture, marking a pivot to digital after two decades in brick and mortar real estate. "We're going to build data centers in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East," Sajwani told CNBC on Wednesday. "We want to build a global company, and we're allocating a billion dollars for that business, and we're going global to put our footprint in all those four continents," he added. Sajwani, who founded Damac Properties in the early 2000s and made a fortune building apartments, hotels and golf courses in and around Dubai, said data centers were a natural progression for his business as the pandemic accelerates a shift to digital work and play. "We have the cash to inject, we've hired a very good team… and we think we can build them at a more reasonable cost than our competitors," Sajwani said. Edgnex, the new wholly owned data center venture of which he is founder and chairman, has already earmarked five plots to develop data centers, including three in Saudi Arabia, two in Turkey and one in