Goldman Sachs’ alternative investments division is buying Lévis, Que.-based QScale, which develops and operates AI-ready data centres.
The American investment bank announced yesterday that Infrastructure at Goldman Sachs Alternatives has closed its acquisition of QScale, in partnership with the Canadian firm’s founders and management team.
Martin Bouchard, QScale
“Partnering with Goldman Sachs Alternatives gives us the capital base and the global network to scale faster.”
As part of that deal, QScale’s founders are reinvesting alongside Goldman Sachs Alternatives and will continue to lead the business, which will keep its headquarters in Québec. Additional financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
This appears to mark at least the second Canadian data centre-related acquisition of a Canadian company by a US firm this year, following Ecolab’s recent deal to buy Calgary’s CoolIT Systems, a leader in liquid cooling for data centres, for $4.75 billion USD.
The acquisition comes amid an increased focus on ensuring that Canada has sovereign computing power not beholden to foreign interests, which to many means data centres that are not only located in Canada, but also controlled by Canadian entities.
QScale, which was founded in 2018, designs, builds, and runs data centres for high-performance computing and AI workloads, including large-scale training and inference. Amid increasing AI adoption, demand for these sorts of data centres is on the rise.
Goldman Sachs Alternatives currently holds more than $625 billion in assets across private equity, growth equity, venture capital, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, sustainability, and hedge funds.
RELATED: Ecolab to acquire CoolIT Systems for $4.75 billion USD
“From day one, QScale was built around a simple thesis: the world will need vastly more compute, and it will need it to be clean, dense, and resilient,” QScale co-founder and CEO Martin Bouchard said in a news release. “Partnering with Goldman Sachs Alternatives gives us the capital base and the global network to scale faster, build bigger, and serve the most demanding hyperscale and AI customers in the world.”
In that same news release, Goldman Sachs Alternatives partner Leonard Seevers said the firm is “excited to partner with Martin and the QScale team to accelerate their build-out and support Canada’s emergence as a global hub for sustainable AI compute.”
Building on its flagship Q01 campus in Lévis, QScale is actively developing additional facilities across Canada.
Feature image courtesy QScale.