Azrieli seeks €1 billion partner for Green Mountain as AI fuels data center boom
Goldman Sachs is searching for an investor in the Norwegian data center company at a valuation of up to €5 billion, six times the price Azrieli paid in 2021.
Against the backdrop of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution driving a global surge of investment into data centers, the Azrieli Group is restarting efforts to bring in a partner for its wholly owned data center subsidiary, Green Mountain.
Calcalist has learned that Azrieli has hired Goldman Sachs to find a strategic investor for the company. The US investment bank has recently begun meeting with potential investors in London as it seeks a partner that can inject approximately €1 billion into Green Mountain.
The deal is expected to be based on a pre-money valuation of €4 billion-€5 billion, although some within Azrieli hope to achieve an even higher valuation.
Under those terms, Green Mountain's post-money valuation would reach at least €5 billion ($5.4 billion), or approximately NIS 17 billion, roughly six times the NIS 2.8 billion valuation at which Azrieli acquired the Norwegian company in 2021.
Compared with the acquisition price, the potential valuation represents a fivefold increase in value before the new investment. If completed at these levels, the incoming investor would receive a stake of approximately 20% in Green Mountain.
The investors being targeted by Goldman Sachs are major international financial institutions specializing in data centers or with significant activity in the sector. These include large private equity firms such as CVC and Blackstone.
Azrieli declined to comment.
Beyond TikTok
The process is being led on behalf of Azrieli by Green Mountain CEO Eyal Henkin, who served as CEO of the Azrieli Group for seven years before stepping down at the end of 2024. He then moved to London to oversee Azrieli's data center operations, which have become a major growth engine for the group.
Azrieli, controlled by the Azrieli family and chaired by Danna Azrieli, first announced its intention to bring in a partner for Green Mountain in January 2024. The process was later frozen.
Although the company has denied any connection, some market participants believe the process was complicated by Green Mountain's large agreement with a Chinese company operating the TikTok social network, which raised concerns among some potential investors.
Since then, Green Mountain has expanded its customer base and reduced TikTok's relative importance within its portfolio.
Last December, the company signed an agreement with an international customer to establish an 80-megawatt data center campus in Norway, with an estimated investment of approximately €1 billion. The project is expected to generate annual net operating income (NOI) of approximately €117 million for Azrieli once fully occupied.
The deal was the largest Green Mountain had signed since its agreement with TikTok.
Following the announcement, IBI investment house real estate analyst Ziv Ein Eli said the deal could support Azrieli's efforts to bring in a partner by improving Green Mountain's operational profile and potentially increasing the valuation of the data center business.
From side business to growth engine
Green Mountain's rapid expansion reflects the broader transformation of data centers from a niche real estate segment into one of the fastest-growing areas of global infrastructure investment, driven largely by demand for AI computing capacity.
Azrieli's data center business has become increasingly important to the group. Until October 2023, the segment also included a 33% stake in Canadian data center operator Compass Datacenters. Azrieli sold that stake at a valuation of $5.7 billion, generating a return of 2.5 times on its original investment made four years earlier.
When Azrieli acquired Green Mountain in 2021, the data center segment generated annual NOI of NIS 53 million, accounting for only about 3% of the group's total NOI.
By the end of 2025, the segment generated NIS 449 million in NOI, representing approximately 18% of Azrieli's total NOI.
The growth has been driven by Green Mountain's geographic expansion, growth in the number of facilities it operates and a significant increase in customer commitments.
In 2021, Green Mountain operated three data centers in a single country. Today, it operates seven facilities across three countries.
The company's contracted capacity has also grown dramatically. Signed contracts increased from 24 megawatts annually in 2021 to 257 megawatts today.
The annual NOI embedded in those contracts has risen accordingly, from NIS 84 million at the time of the acquisition to more than NIS 1 billion today.
The rise of data centers has also reshaped Azrieli's overall asset mix, which includes office properties in Israel and the US, shopping centers in Israel, hotels and rental housing.
Before acquiring Green Mountain, in 2020, Azrieli's data center assets were valued at NIS 1.1 billion, representing only 3% of its total asset portfolio.
By the end of the first quarter of 2026, the value of its data center assets had reached NIS 11.7 billion, representing approximately 18% of total assets.
The expansion into data centers has also contributed to Azrieli's stock market performance. Over the past three years, the company's share price has risen 121%, compared with a 74% increase in the Tel Aviv Real Estate Index.
Azrieli currently has a market capitalization of NIS 52.7 billion, making it Israel's largest income-producing real estate company by market value.
