SoftBank closed its acquisition of DigitalBridge Group this week for roughly $3.1 billion, a number that looks almost small next to what it actually buys: control of a company managing more than $108 billion in digital infrastructure assets worldwide. DigitalBridge holds stakes in data center operators including Vantage Data Centers, Switch, DataBank and Yondr Group, plus positions in telecom towers and fiber networks, making it one of the largest digital infrastructure investors operating globally.
The deal itself doesn’t touch any of those underlying portfolio companies directly. SoftBank is acquiring DigitalBridge as the investment platform, not buying out the individual data centers and fiber networks it holds stakes in. DigitalBridge will keep operating as a separately managed subsidiary under current CEO Marc Ganzi, and its financial results now fold into SoftBank’s consolidated statements starting from the acquisition date. One immediate consequence: DigitalBridge exits the New York Stock Exchange entirely, now that it’s a controlled subsidiary rather than a publicly traded company.
SoftBank and DigitalBridge first announced this deal back in December, so the closing itself carries no real surprise. What’s more interesting is the company SoftBank just absorbed, and the odd path it took to get here. What now operates as DigitalBridge actually started life in 1991 as Colony Capital, a name with no obvious connection to digital infrastructure at all. Ganzi founded the original Digital Bridge separately in 2013. Colony acquired his company in 2019 for $325 million, then rebranded the combined entity to DigitalBridge in 2021 and sold off most of its non-digital assets to focus entirely on the space it now dominates.
That history matters for understanding why SoftBank wanted this deal in the first place. DigitalBridge isn’t a data center operator building infrastructure from scratch. It’s an investment platform with existing stakes already spread across dozens of companies in the sector, giving SoftBank immediate, diversified exposure to digital infrastructure without having to build those relationships or make those individual investments itself from zero.
For a company racing to position itself in AI and cloud infrastructure, buying an established platform with $108 billion already under management is a considerably faster path than assembling that same portfolio piece by piece over years.
