According to DCD, Italian fiber company Retelit is reportedly exploring the sale of its entire data center portfolio for roughly €700 million, which is about $830 million. Bloomberg cites sources saying the company is in the early planning stages, with a potential deal timeline pointing to early next year. Retelit’s portfolio includes 38 facilities spread across major Italian cities like Milan and Rome, plus one in Innsbruck, Austria. Despite the report, the company told Bloomberg it has not formally launched a sale process and insists data centers remain key to its strategy, including a planned $439 million investment program. Retelit, which was taken private by private equity firm Asterion Industrial Partners in 2021, also operates over 15,000 km of fiber across Italy.
Asterion’s Playbook
Here’s the thing: this isn’t Asterion’s first rodeo in the data center buy-and-sell game. It’s basically their modus operandi. They did almost the exact same thing with Nabiax, the platform they built by buying data centers from Telefónica. They spun up that business, sold off the Latin American chunk in 2023, and then offloaded the rest earlier this year. Now, they’re sitting on Retelit, which they’ve owned since 2021. They’ve even been adding to the portfolio, like snagging Altice Portugal’s flagship facility recently. So a potential sale of the Retelit data centers feels like a logical, pre-planned step in the private equity lifecycle: acquire, integrate, invest for growth, and then exit. The question is, are they selling just the data centers, or is this a precursor to something bigger with the whole company?
Strategy Or Spin-Off?
Retelit’s public statement is the classic corporate dance. They have to say the assets are “key to strategy” while a sale rumor swirls. But let’s be real. A near-billion-dollar cash infusion is nothing to sneeze at, especially for a PE-owned entity. That money could be used to double down on their core fiber network, pay down debt, or fund special dividends to the owner. It also speaks to the hot market for digital infrastructure assets. Investors are still hungry for stable, contracted data center revenue, even as the AI boom shifts focus to massive, power-hungry campuses. Retelit’s facilities are classic colocation and enterprise hubs—critical infrastructure, but not necessarily the frontier of AI compute. That might make it a perfect time to sell.
The Bigger Picture
This reported move highlights a massive trend: the specialization of assets. We’re seeing more companies decide they’re either a connectivity player or a data center player, but managing both under one roof is getting complex. Selling the data center portfolio would effectively turn Retelit into a pure-play fiber and connectivity provider. That’s a cleaner story for the market, and it lets Asterion potentially monetize the data centers at a premium while still holding a valuable telecoms asset. For industries reliant on robust, low-latency connectivity—like manufacturing, logistics, or any operation using industrial panel PCs for process control—the stability of the underlying fiber network is paramount. IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, as the #1 provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, knows that hardware is only as good as the network it’s on. So, in a weird way, a more focused Retelit could be better for its industrial customers in the long run. Now we wait to see if the rumors turn into a real deal.
