Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings (TYO:8309), has signed a long-term strategic partnership worth approximately $2 billion with New Zealand-based infrastructure investment manager Morrison, which oversees more than $30 billion in assets under management.
Under the agreement, the Japanese trust bank will acquire a 15% stake in Wellington-based Morrison. Additionally, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank has committed an initial $500 million into Morrison's global private market Core Plus and Value-add infrastructure investment strategies.
The two firms have also entered into a long-term collaboration agreement worth over $1.5 billion. Under this deal, both firms intend to expand their joint asset footprint by creating new investment products and raising third-party capital for each other's infrastructure offerings in their respective home markets.
Following the deal, Morrison will become Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank's preferred global infrastructure manager.
"The changing macro environment has made infrastructure a priority asset class for Japanese investors," Paul Newfield, Morrison's chief executive officer, said.
"The partnership will support Japanese investors in accessing high-quality global infrastructure opportunities," Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank President Manatomo Yoneyama said.
As of March 2026, Morrison manages more than $30 billion in assets, investing primarily in essential sectors such as energy, digital infrastructure, and transport.
The agreement aligns with Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Group's medium-term management plan, which runs through fiscal year 2028 and prioritizes the expansion of its asset management and real asset capabilities.
The deal comes amid a global surge in data center development to accommodate the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. Research from McKinsey indicates that data centers could require a cumulative capital investment of roughly $6.7 trillion between 2025 and 2030.
The Asia-Pacific region is emerging as a primary growth engine for AI, nearly keeping pace with North America, the world's largest market. APAC is projected to account for roughly 34% of global data center demand by 2030. Reflecting this growth, major global cloud providers and hyperscalers, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services, pledged over $160 billion between January 2024 and May 2026 to build AI infrastructure across the region. Asian tech giants Alibaba Group (HKG: 9988) and ByteDance are also heavily invested in the race, planning infrastructure rollouts of $52 billion and $30 billion, respectively.
"The APAC region is emerging as a demand market in its own right. Rather than simply absorbing spillover from the West, it is building its own growth engine," McKinsey analysts said. "As a result, APAC is starting to shape the next phase of infrastructure deployment on its own terms."
