The

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board

and

Australia’s

Goodman Group agreed to set up a multibillion dollar

European data centre business

, as the rise of

artificial intelligence

drives demand for power and storage sites.

Under the partnership, the

Canadian pension fund manager

and Goodman, an industrial property investment manager, will initially invest US$2.6 billion to develop

data centre projects

in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris, the companies said in a statement Tuesday.

Construction is due to start by the end of June next year, they said.

Shares of Goodman jumped 6.7 per cent to A$31.17 at 10:30 a.m. in Sydney after the announcement, trimming this year’s decline to 13 per cent.

The increasing use of machine learning and cloud-based technologies is triggering a rush to build data centres around the world, spurring mergers and acquisitions in the data centre and

power industries

. Alphabet Inc. on Monday agreed to buy energy developer Intersect Power LLC for US$4.75 billion, in order to access more electricity for its data centres.

Robin Khuda, founder and chief executive officer of Australian data-centre operator AirTrunk, in November described the wave of global investments in artificial intelligence as “the single-biggest gold rush in human history.” AirTrunk was bought by Blackstone Inc. last year for A$24 billion.

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Bloomberg.com