Customers in Denmark’s PFA Pension have received nearly DKK 1.5bn in return on investments in several European data centres after PFA sold its ownership stake.

The DKK 1.45bn profit was obtained three years after the initial investment was made.

PFA stated that the revolution within cloud storage and artificial intelligence has created a “massive demand” for data centres in Europe and the rest of the world.

Three years ago, PFA invested in the European company Data4, which operates data centres in France, Spain, Germany, Poland, and Luxembourg.

The pension company bought approximately 20 per cent of the company and has now sold this stake to Brookfield Infrastructure with a profit of DKK 1.45bn, corresponding to an annual return of around 25 per cent.

“We entered into the investment in 2020 because we could see that the supply of data centres could not keep up with the increasing demand,” commented PFA property director, Michael Bruhn.

“Today we can see that the expectation of a high return was well-founded, and it feels good to be able to pass on more than a billion to the customers.”

Data4 is among the largest European data centre operators and, when PFA bought into the company at the time, it was, among other things, provided that the energy consumption in the data centres had to be matched by energy production from renewable energy sources.

"We follow the tech sector closely and, on a general level, have invested in a large number of leading companies that supply both technology and know-how for development,” Bruhn continued.

“At the same time, we have continued to own shares in a number of data centres in the US and Asia, which are experiencing strongly increasing demand for data storage.”

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