NEWPORT-based Next Generation Data has been acquired in a deal amounting to around £100m.

NGD, Europe's largest data centre, which is housed in the former LG building on the west of Newport, has been acquired by InfraVia European Fund III , who have bought a controlling stake in the business.

NGD’s founders, Simon Taylor, chairman, and chief executive Nick Razey will remain significant shareholders in the company.

NGD opened its flagship 750,000sq ft data centre in early 2010. The largest data centre in Europe includes its own private connection to the National SuperGrid with up to 180MW of power (sufficient to power a city the size of Bristol) generated from 100 per cent renewable sources.

NGD has attracted large multinational clients including a number of major Cloud Computing service providers. These require secure, resilient and scalable data processing and storage facilities for hosting Cloud, Big Data and High Performance Computing infrastructures.

Investment from InfraVia will enable NGD to accelerate future growth: it will be used for the expansion of existing UK data centre capacity including the addition of a second site and connection of further high speed transatlantic fibre communications networks. The funding will also be made available for stepping up international sales efforts, especially in North America and Asia.

Vincent Levita, founder and CEO of InfraVia, said: "We have been impressed by the momentum achieved by the management team and we believe that NGD is ideally positioned to capture further growth thanks to its unique offering, flexible expansion potential and high quality infrastructure.

“We are delighted to start the deployment of our third fund with NGD and our ambition is to provide the company with long term institutional capital to embark into a new development phase”.

Simon Taylor and Nick Razey, will retain their respective positions on the new board. All NGD data centre operational management will also continue, as will Dr Simon Orebi Gann as non-executive director.

Simon Taylor, NGD’s chairman said: “We have become the UK’s first choice for blue chip organisations requiring spacious world-class data centre facilities for reasons of power, energy efficiency, security and price. With the additional financial resources of InfraVia we will be able to take our business to the next level by maximising repeat and new business opportunities as global organisations continue to demand more data centre space and power for accommodating increased cloud computing deployments. In addition, we believe that Brexit will possibly increase the on-shoring of data which we see as positive for NGD going forward.”