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Brookfield, Canadian pension fund to buy Compass Datacenters

(Reuters) - Privately held Compass Datacenters will be sold to a consortium led by Brookfield Infrastructure Partners LP and existing investor Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan for an undisclosed sum, the data center operator said on Tuesday.

The deal has an enterprise value of about $5.5 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Reuters reported last month that Brookfield and DigitalBridge Group Inc were battling it out in the auction for Compass, whose owners also include RedBird Capital Partners and the Azrieli Group.

Dealmaking in the data center sector has spiked in recent years as rapid growth fueled by cloud computing has attracted large infrastructure investors, while the fragmented nature of the industry has driven consolidation.

In April, Brookfield snapped up a majority stake in Data4 in a deal that valued the data center operator at close to 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) including debt, Reuters reported.

"The need for data storage continues to grow at an exponential rate across the globe, and Compass complements our existing platforms in South America, Europe and Asia Pacific," said Sam Pollock, CEO of Brookfield Infrastructure.

Compass founder and CEO Chris Crosby, along with the current management team, will continue to lead the company after the deal's expected close by 2023-end.

Goldman Sachs, Guggenheim Securities and Deutsche Bank Securities advised Compass and RedBird. BMO Capital Markets and Scotiabank advised Brookfield Infrastructure, while TD Securities was the advisor to Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.

(Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)