Marketing the massive: Airtrunk’s rise to $24 billion
How do you market a business that can’t name its clients, reveal the location of its premises or put its brand on the product?
That’s the challenge faced by Lise Kay, VP of marketing and corporate communications at Airtrunk, an Australian data centre company worth $24 billion.
To be fair, Kay does not see it that way. When the driven, effusive marketing boss spoke with Mumbrella, she painted a picture of a job that had taken everything she’s got and been worth it. She doesn’t appear to rue the lack of traditional marketing opportunity.
Lise Kay
“I wouldn’t have changed anything. It’s been so good,” she said. “There has been no day in eight years that has been the same.”
The cause of that variation is an unusual business structure honed to its product niche.
“ Even though we’re not a consumer brand, selling for $24 billion kind of raises your profile.”
That whopping valuation may come as a surprise, and it puts Airtrunk in the same league as household names like Coles (market cap $29 billion) and Telstra (around $43 billion).
While business watchers may have heard of the company – it was bought by Blackstone last year in a deal that naturally drew attention – many people don’t know what it does.
The answer, as Kay says, is straightforward: Airtrunk builds and runs massive data centres for massive clients.
Airtrunk’s SYD2 centre under construction
Those massive clients – the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – are voracious consumers of data centre floor space and power, with billions to invest as they scale their AI strategies.
This is also the reason Kay can’t tell me exactly where the data centres are or which company has put servers inside. So far, they have built 11 through Australia and Asia, with a third Sydney centre under construction and more planned.
“We don’t brand our data centres; they’re private because we host the largest tech companies,” she said. “We can’t name our customers and I can’t trot out a ‘here’s a testimonial’ slide deck.”
The peculiarities don’t end there.
“We don’t have a sales team. Everyone—engineers, energy specialists—is effectively an account manager.”
It’s a case of form fitting function.
Airtrunk was founded by Robin Khuda in 2015 in Sydney. When Kay arrived within a two years as employee number 10, Khuda had a company name, a single contract to build a centre, and a strategy to serve only the data needs of the “hyperscalers”. But that was about it.
“I literally had a company name, an old logo and a holding page of a website saying ‘coming soon’,” Kay said. “My first day at Airtrunk, I still don’t think I really knew what I was getting myself into. There was no data centre for me to go and explore and see what it was … I’d never been inside one.”
She hired an agency to work on the brand, and released the brand identity (see above) the day its first centre opened.
“ On the same day I launched the brand, our first data center in Western Sydney, our website and our PR function,” she said. “It was a big day and I did it with no team at all.”
With a potential customer pool of only 5-10 global digital giants, Airtrunk’s key skill – aside from actually building world-class data centres – is managing the customer relationship. A typical lease on a data centre is 15 years.
“Core to the success of the business has been customer relationships. They don’t commit to those sort of length of leases and huge contracts without having a really strong relationship.”
Kay has been a key element in managing those relationships, along with dealing with the stakeholders that come with building physical spaces that have floor space many times the size of the MCG and draw the power of small cities.
“The great thing about my role is the diversity of stakeholders … it could be the investors, the banks, governments, communities, and of course, customers.”
Lise Kay presenting to a classroom in the NT
Before moving to Airtrunk, Kay worked for Fairfax for years, rising to Head of Trade Marketing. She was awarded a fellowship at The Marketing Academy in 2023, and said it was useful in providing connections through the industry at CMO-level and above.
“At that stage, no one knew who Airtrunk was,” she said. “There are three residentials. So we had one in outside of Sydney, one in Singapore, one in Tokyo. And you just immerse yourself completely for two days. McKinsey delivers a lot of the content.”
She names Airtrunk’s social impact program as being an achievement she values most highly.
“I really championed the social impact program, which has been a huge differentiator for Airtrunk,” she said. “We’re directing the money to various partnerships across APAC. I just came back from the Northern Territory where we just launched a clean drinking water solution for a really remote school.”
“We’ve been scaling the business, and the marketing and the reputation build and all of that work. But then we’re balancing it with supporting communities.”
“It’s constantly changing, constantly growing, and I thrive in that sort of ever-changing environment,” Kay said.
“At Airtrunk I gave everything to the brand, so it’s a big part of me.”
Note: Applications close for The Marketing Academy’s Fellowship on 30 May 2025. This article has not been sponsored and there is no commercial relationship beween Mumbrella and The Marketing Academy.
Also note: Airtrunk styles its name as “AirTrunk”. Mumbrella has a policy of standardising case where possible for company names.
Have your say