A new breed of airport investor emerges as AI data centres home in on Indian airport locations

Technology continues to shape the airport business as it does many others. At the same time fewer investors have been considering airports as homes for their money as there have been in the past.

So it is illuminating to discover a new investor in them, one that has no known prior experience of the sector but which has become a major player in financing artificial intelligence (AI) and its supporting infrastructure.

The American company, more used to investments in the likes of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, has joined a consortium that involves a local Indian company, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund and the world's largest asset manager to take a stake in India's Adani Airports, the largest private sector airport operator there, which when completed will total over 5.5%.

What might such an investor or asset manager want out of this? One evident objective would be to take advantage of Adani's multiple airport city projects which could support some of the huge data centres that India needs urgently although there are many other options as this report suggests.

The question is whether these huge, power hungry projects that are spilling over into the air transport sector will actually go ahead or if the dire warnings issued by executives in the AI sector will prompt a radical rethink about the seemingly unstoppable march of AI technology.