When confronted with a quote by former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chair Rod Sims, Banducci interjected “retired”.

It was a minor dig, but when the interviewer failed to agree to cut it from the interview, Banducci walked out, triggering a media storm.

The New Zealand Shareholders Association also queried why Banducci’s most recent role, chief executive of the private equity-owned Ticketek Entertainment Group (TEG) between early 2025 and May this year, was not included in the notice of minutes.

So did activist investor Stephen Mayne.

The Australian Financial Review reported at the time that Banducci made an “abrupt exit” from Ticketek after clashing with the firm’s private equity owners, Silver Lake, amid market share losses.

Infratil chair Alison Gerry said Ticketek was not included “because it was a private company, he held the role for a short period of time, and we didn’t think it relevant to the reasons why we wanted him sitting around the Infratil board table”.

Those centred on his operational experience, particularly at Woolworths, which would help replace the skill set lost as the long-serving Peter Springford retired.

However, Banducci seemed happy to discuss his time at Ticketek.

“I learnt a lot in my 15 months at Ticketek. The primary thing I got to do was go really deep on technology. In a very large business like Woolworths, there are many layers between you and where the work is done.

“I got to really get hands-on with the tools – which I think is key right now. We all need to be engaging with the power of GenAI [Generative artificial intelligence], whether we like it philosophically or ethically, or not, and see what it can unlock in the context of a business – and that’s something I got to do over the past 15 months.”

Banducci gave all TEG staffers access to Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini Pro and invested “hefty” amounts into new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning systems, enabling new features including the ability to upgrade to empty seats in the middle of an event.

But Silverlake was reportedly unhappy with the amount he had spent on new technology and AI engineering hires.

NZSA chief executive Oliver Mander told the Herald that although his group had questioned the Ticketek omission, it agreed that Banducci had the operational chops.

The appointment of Banducci plus a second director based in Australia, Tiffany Fuller (Computershare, Washington H. Soul Pattinson), also gave Infratil a better regional spread, Mander said.

Management fee can be paid in script

Mander’s group also voted in favour of another key resolution: that Infratil’s board have the option to pay all or part of a pending incentive fee payment to its manager, Morrison, in shares rather than cash.

The motion carried with 91% support.

Morrison earned some $346 million in incentive fees for FY26, payable over the following three years. The third instalment was the subject of the cash versus scrip question.

Mander said the measure gave the board more flexibility and was part of a series of reforms that had made Morrison’s management fee more palatable.

The perennial question of whether Infratil’s management should be internalised was raised by three shareholders during the Q&A.

Gerry said Infratil got 20 fulltime Morrison executives as part of the deal, with access to 200 more. She noted Morrison did not clear its 12% hurdle and received no incentive fee for FY26 (though $103.4m was paid in separate management fees).

In March, the landscape changed as Japanese heavyweight Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank took a 15% stake in Morrison.

Gerry said the deal did not change the Infratil-Morrison relationship. There had always been a “healthy tension” between Infratil’s board and Morrison, which had a number of clients, as they looked for investment opportunities both together and separately.

A single contract was ‘transformational’

Artificial intelligence – or “AI factories”, AKA data centres, loomed large over the meeting.

“Market volatility meant FY26 was not quite the steadier year we had hoped for – Liberation Day etc. However, since then, CDC’s announcement of Australasia’s largest ever data centre contract, in early May, more than made up for that,” said Infratil chief executive Jason Boyes.

Infratil owns just under half of CDC, which has emerged as easily its largest asset.

Investors cheered the monster 550-megawatt (MW) contract, with an unnamed US customer, when it was revealed in May. Infratil’s shares spiked to an all-time high.

Boyes called the 550MW contract “transformational”.

CDC now had a pipeline of one gigawatt (1GW or 1000MW) of contracted capacity and was building new data centres to fill it.

CDC’s operating earnings are forecast to increase from A$392m in FY26 to between A$680m and A$720m in FY27 and more than A$1 billion in FY28.

Boyes said once CDC has built and is invoicing its 1GW of contracted capacity, that will grow to about A$2b on an annualised basis.

This year, CDC expects to spend A$3.8b to A$4.2b to build more data centre capacity, excluding land, the Infratil chief executive added, “massive numbers”, displaying a slide of CDC’s 200MW Eastern Creek “campus” in Sydney, which is currently being upgraded.

In June, CDC added 90MW of capacity and doubled the amount under construction to 800MW of capacity being added across various sites.

Earlier this month, CDC also announced it’s partnered with Contact to explore a 250MW data centre for Stratford in Taranaki (a Fitch survey recently said that the 60 data centres in New Zealand today have a combined 170MW capacity).

Concentration risk?

Boyes flashed up slides showing the rising dominance of “digital infrastructure”, shown in blue, in Infratil’s portfolio.

“CDC’s size in our portfolio is a big chunk of that blue. It means some investors ask, and they should, when we might sell it to reduce any potential concentration risk.

“Our view at the moment is that we remain comfortable with its position and scale in our portfolio today. Approximately half of CDC’s valuation is low risk, comprising lengthy leases for mostly new, cutting-edge data centres, to some of the world’s most credit-worthy customers.”

CDC owns its data centre buildings and infrastructure, while clients like Amazon and Microsoft lease space to “co-locate” their servers inside it.

“Our focus is around sifting through the noise around AI, and there’s a lot of it, to understand what really matters for our existing businesses. We’re in a good position to do that.

“We see demand first hand at CDC, then we see the implications for energy demand through Longroad Energy and our other energy businesses [which include a 9% stake in Contact] and then we’re seeing the practical implications of AI at scale in One NZ or our teleradiology businesses.”

‘Lightning rod for protest’

“Maybe today or in the future, data centres are going to become a lightning rod for protest, not just from whacko greenies but from ordinary citizens who happen to be in the vicinity of data centres,” a shareholder said. (Some have already happened.)

How was Infratil preparing?

“It’s very important though and CDC is very focused on maintaining its social licence to operate,” Boyes said.

The firm had been using closed-loop water cooling for more than 18 years.

“We’re ahead of the game on water,” Boyes said.

He added: “The key for CDC to think about is where we build our data centres – being outside residential areas, being in industrial areas as much as you can and having buffer zones around them is really important … you’re building a long way away from people so you don’t have neighbour issues.”

The Stratford data centre would be on a brownfields industrial site.

Distance can be relative however. CDC’s most recent data centre built in northwest Auckland (see clip below) is in a light industrial area but immediately across Hobsonville Rd from suburban homes.

Above: CDC NZ’s Hobsonville 2 data centre at 92D Hobsonville Rd, opened near the start of the company’s 2026 financial year.

Sustainability features would be continuously improved, Boyes said.

It was also important to “zoom out” and consider the wider role of data centres.

“They’re critical infrastructure for a country,” Boyes said.

“Countries in the future will really struggle without this infrastructure. It’s very economically important for a jurisdiction to have this.”

The industry has opened up noticeably, even over the past month as the first protests have emerged.

Earlier this week, Datagrid founder Remi Galasso met with 100 Southland locals about his firm’s “AI factory” as earthworks began, and pledged to hold monthly meetings.

AI bubble fear

“What contingency plans does Infratil have in place for when the AI bubble bursts?” a shareholder asked during the Q&A.

“Well, if you could let me know the date, that would be really helpful,” Gerry quipped.

“But because of the concentration risk, we do ask, ‘What if there is a significant pull-back in the valuation of CDC and what would that mean for CDC’s credit metrics and its ability to fund itself in the future – and what would that mean for Infratil and own credit metrics?’

“So we have done stress-testing exercises on theoretical scenarios so we know we have sufficient liquidity to be able to support volatility that comes through from sentiment in the AI space.”

Tomorrow’s pickleball courts?

“Some time over the next several years, is there a danger of overbuild in data centres? I heard one US commentator recently say that data centres will become tomorrow’s pickleball courts,” a shareholder said.

“How will we know when it’s time to sell data centres, just as we got out of Tilt Renewables?”

AI-fuelled demand for data centres seems insatiable today, but some analysts see large language models becoming much more efficient over time (a trend first flagged by China’s DeepSeek as sanctions forced its creators to make do with older chips), reducing the amount of hardware grunt required.

“The answer is potentially ‘yes’ on overbuild,” Boyes said.

“But the question is where and will it affect our business. We’re building data centres that are leased out for long periods of time and that’s more than half the valuation of CDC, which I think is not a particularly challenging or bubbly valuation.”

Even if contracts stopped today, there was still $2b ebitda of contracts in the pipeline, Boyes said.

“A lot of the overbuild – if there’s overbuild happening – would be in the US for shorter-life data centres.”

He was upbeat on the technology. It was part of Infratil’s model, and past success, to concentrate investment in its “high conviction” areas.

Today, that was the data centres being fuelled by the cloud computing and artificial intelligence boom.

“It’s pretty clear AI is going to be transformational, just like railroads, electricity, and the internet have before,” Boyes said during his introductory remarks.

An investor cautioned during the Q&A: “Most of the railroad investors went broke because they overbuilt.”

Today, such concerns are far away. Infratil shares were flat at $14.91 in midday trading. The stock is up 22% for the year.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.