AirTrunk celebrates 10 years with social fund launch

Hyperscale data centre specialist AirTrunk has celebrated its first 10 years with the official launch of its social impact program.

Through strategic partnerships, AirTrunk’s social impact program will address urgent social and environmental challenges.

It will deliver long-term, positive outcomes via funding, grants, ecosystem collaboration, knowledge sharing, and employee engagement. The program will be funded through margin adjustments from AirTrunk’s sustainability-linked loans (SLL).

It aims to create lasting social and environmental impact in Asia Pacific and Japan and as the business scales in the coming years, the program will grow into a multi-million-dollar fund.

At the recent Schneider Electric Innovation Summit in Sydney 2025 AirTrunk CFO Prashant Murthy said the data centre industry has evolved, going from focusing on infrastructure and contract structures to increasingly considering the impact on the entire ecosystem. This includes water, power, integration with other sectors, and sustainability.

“You know, we do have a really cool sustainability debt platform, we’ve been softly announcing it for the last two years when we kicked it off, but we actually have converted all of our debt into sustainable income,” he said.

“We have projects live in Australia and in Japan,” he said. “We have one that was about to be launched in Malaysia that unfortunately had to be pulled back. We have [been] running one in Singapore…we’re going to continue to sort of move in that direction.”

Fundamentally this industry and AirTrunk’s spot in this industry was tied to adding social value, explained Murthy.

Local foundation partnerships for AirTrunk’s social impact program includes the Australian Business and Community Network (ABCN) which supports students from low socio-economic Western Sydney high schools to pursue careers in STEM through a career pathways program linked with the university.

As well as DeadlyScience which provides STEM programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in regional and remote schools; Rural Aid and Source, an organisation that creates clean drinking water for remote schools in the Northern Territory using innovative hydropanel technology and Western Sydney University, which offers equity scholarships for STEM students to encourage success and access to higher education.

A Look to the Future

With 10 years gone by AirTrunk, is also looking ahead to a future shaped by accelerating digital transformation, AI adoption, and growing demand for cloud infrastructure.

As the world’s economies expand on a foundation of digital infrastructure, AirTrunk plans to continue to create shared value, benefiting local communities through workforce development, renewable energy, circularity, decarbonised supply chains, clean technologies, and advancing social impact initiatives.

In February, AirTrunk announced its second data centre in Malaysia and is set to announce further expansion plans across the region to scale and meet cloud customers’ needs, said AirTrunk CEO Robin Khuda.

“AirTrunk is just getting started. As the speed of change accelerates, we’re focused on innovating to deliver for our customers and ensure shared value for our communities,” he said. “Through our social impact program, AirTrunk sets the stage for the next decade, where business success and societal benefits go hand in hand.”