Private equity's hunt for the pipes and cages that hold the internet together has reached one of its most coveted trophies. TPG, the $250 billion alternative-asset manager, is in exclusive negotiations to buy Netrality Data Centers from Macquarie Asset Management in a transaction that could value the interconnection specialist at between $2 billion and $3 billion, according to reports that surfaced July 27. If it closes as expected in the fall, it would rank among the largest data-center deals of 2026 and hand TPG one of the most strategically located pieces of physical infrastructure in the AI economy.
Netrality is not a hyperscale developer racing to pour concrete in the desert. It is something rarer and, to a certain kind of buyer, more valuable: the largest privately held operator of core network interconnection sites in the United States. The company runs 18 facilities across North America spanning 3.3 million square feet and more than 100 megawatts of capacity, concentrated in "carrier hotels" — the dense, network-rich downtown buildings in Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis and Indianapolis where fiber operators, cloud providers and content networks physically plug into one another. Inside Netrality's carrier-neutral Meet-Me-Rooms, traffic changes hands directly rather than looping across the public internet, a function that becomes more, not less, critical as AI workloads push oceans of data between models, storage and end users.
Why the carrier hotel is suddenly hot
For most of the past decade, interconnection assets were treated as sleepy, bond-like infrastructure: steady cash flows, high barriers to entry, unglamorous. The AI buildout has rewritten that thesis. Training and inference are creating enormous demand not only for raw compute and power but for the low-latency connective tissue that moves data between facilities. Carrier hotels sit at the choke points of that network, and their locations — often the single most connected building in a metro — are effectively impossible to replicate.
That scarcity is what institutional capital is chasing. Netrality's competitors, including DataBank and EdgeCore, have drawn heavy investor interest of their own over the past year, part of a broader wave of money flooding into digital infrastructure. Macquarie itself understood the appeal early. When its Macquarie Infrastructure Partners IV fund, then part of a $129 billion portfolio, acquired a majority stake in Netrality from Abrams Capital Management in September 2019, fund chief executive Karl Kuchel framed the logic in terms that read as prescient today.
"Netrality's facilities represent a critical form of digital infrastructure," Kuchel said at the time. "In addition to facilitating the public internet, the sites allow companies to build direct private connections between networks."
Netrality was founded in 2015 by Gerald Marshall and partners out of the property investment firm Amerimar Enterprises, with a plan to buy the most network-rich buildings in key urban markets and upgrade their interconnection infrastructure. Marshall, describing the 2019 Macquarie deal, said the company would gain "access to significant growth capital" to buy more businesses and properties and to "leverage their institutional relationships." A $605 million financing round in July 2025 further fattened the balance sheet — and, in hindsight, positioned the business for exactly the kind of exit now taking shape.
TPG's methodical infrastructure land grab
For TPG, Netrality would slot into an increasingly aggressive digital-infrastructure strategy. Over the past year the firm has committed roughly $1 billion to Tata Consultancy Services' HyperVault AI data-center business in India, agreed to fund half of a separate $2 billion TCS data-center project, sealed a $3.5 billion deal for power-infrastructure company Sabre, and joined Google and Intersect Power in a $20 billion clean-energy-for-data-centers partnership. TPG has also formed a hyperscale joint venture with Digital Realty in Northern Virginia.
Executive Chairman Jim Coulter has articulated why the category appeals to a firm that must put tens of billions of dollars to work. "Data centers are a multifaceted asset class and sit at the intersection of green energy infrastructure, technology and real estate," Coulter said in describing the TCS partnership late last year. Netrality offers a different flavor of that thesis — less about megawatts of new compute and more about owning the irreplaceable interconnection points through which AI's data must flow.
The deal also reflects a maturing exit market for infrastructure funds. Macquarie, having held Netrality for nearly seven years and grown it from six facilities to 18, is doing what infrastructure sponsors do: recycling a well-timed bet into fresh capital. A sale to TPG would mark a clean handoff between two of the largest players in a sector where assets increasingly trade among a small club of megafunds rather than reaching public markets.
What to watch
The talks are exclusive but not closed, and reports peg completion as early as fall 2026 — leaving room for the valuation to firm up anywhere in that $2 billion-to-$3 billion band. Watch for the final headline number, which will signal how aggressively buyers are willing to pay for interconnection scarcity versus raw capacity. Watch, too, for whether Netrality's management, still led by its founding team, rolls equity into the new structure. And watch the read-through for DataBank, EdgeCore and other interconnection operators still on the block: a rich price for Netrality would confirm that the smart money now sees the internet's oldest plumbing as one of AI's most durable bets.
"Data centers are a multifaceted asset class and sit at the intersection of green energy infrastructure, technology and real estate."- Jim Coulter, Executive Chairman, TPG