Princeton Digital Group (PDG), supported by Warburg Pincus, has initiated the sale of its assets in China. Insiders revealed that the transaction amount could reach up to $1 billion, signaling the trend of foreign capital withdrawing from sensitive digital infrastructure in China is nearing completion.
Warburg Pincus, Bain Capital, and Carlyle Group are all globally renowned and influential private equity (PE) and alternative asset management companies. Warburg Pincus and Bain Capital made investments in Chinese data centers in 2017, while Carlyle Group started from 2020. Bain Capital completed the overall sale of Chinese data centers in 2025, and Carlyle Group gradually exited the Chinese market through refinancing between 2024 and 2026. Recently disclosed by the Financial Times, three insiders revealed that Warburg Pincus has started the sale of its assets in China, indicating that all global private equity funds will withdraw from the Chinese data center market.
Previously, the Chinese official media “Guandian Net” reported on April 24 that PDG, supported by Warburg Pincus, was considering introducing equity partners and had engaged Goldman Sachs to negotiate equity sales.
In the initial stages of investment, PDG rapidly expanded its business in China. According to its Chinese website, PDG strategically invested in data centers in major hub cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, the pan-Beijing area, Xi’an, and Foshan in China. Among them, the pan-Beijing campus of PDG comprises multiple buildings and offers a total capacity of 100MW.
Founded in 2017 by former India Telecom and Data Center executives Rangu Salgame and Varoon Raghavan, along with private equity fund Warburg Pincus, PDG is headquartered in Singapore. Its primary business involves providing data center, cloud infrastructure, and computing power services to cloud service providers, AI companies, large internet platforms, financial institutions, and multinational corporations.
Warburg Pincus, headquartered in New York, is one of the earliest large-scale U.S. PE funds to enter the China and Asia markets. It specializes in investing in “high-growth industries” and “long-term structural trends,” including technology, AI, financial technology, healthcare, energy transition, real estate, digital infrastructure, and data centers.
One of the reasons for the collective withdrawal of foreign capital from Chinese data centers is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has elevated its control over data to the level of “national strategic resources.”
The CCP’s Data Security Law took effect in 2021, with core concepts including data classification and grading. Companies are required by the CCP to classify data, determine which falls under “important data,” and then establish a national-level protection mechanism.
For businesses, the definition of “important data” is broad, with the CCP having the ultimate authority to interpret. Therefore, businesses, especially foreign ones, are concerned about which data may suddenly be classified as “important data,” whether it can flow freely (such as overseas), and whether companies will be required to cooperate with audits.
In 2021, Didi Chuxing’s U.S. listing faced investigation on grounds of “national data security,” showing the global investment community that the CCP government can directly intervene in the operations of major data platforms.
The scrutiny of Didi Chuxing led to substantial losses for Vision Fund. SoftBank Group mentioned the losses brought by Didi Chuxing in its May 2022 Consolidated Financial Report, citing the effects of tightened regulatory policies on the market and substantial fines imposed on Alibaba by CCP regulatory authorities under the guise of anti-monopoly measures.
Industry analysis suggests that for multinational data center operators like PDG, if sensitive data cannot freely leave the country, large platforms will face increased compliance costs, legal risks, and platform architectural complexity.