Macquarie sells its Polish fiber duo to Deutsche Telekom for €1bn

Macquarie Asset Management is selling Fiberhost and INEA, two Polish network operators, to Deutsche Telekom. The price, per Data Center Dynamics, is €1 billion ($1.16 billion). The deal is expected to close at the end of 2026, when both companies fold into T-Mobile Polska, Deutsche Telekom's Polish subsidiary.

The sale closes an eight-year hold. Macquarie bought INEA, then based in western Poland, in 2018. Three years later it spun the fiber-to-the-home operation out as Fiberhost. Fiberhost's last-mile network passes 1.4 million homes. The footprint spans eight Polish regions. It includes 3,000 schools. INEA says it serves more than 300,000 individual customers. Deutsche Telekom is paying €1 billion for that footprint.

Macquarie managing director Cord von Lewinski cast the sale as a completed buildout. Over the past eight years, he said, the firm "partnered with management to support the development" of the two companies, expanding network coverage and increasing wholesale access. He described Fiberhost and INEA as "one of Poland's leading fiber infrastructure platforms."

T-Mobile Polska sees convergence. Chief executive Andreas Maierhofer said the purchase puts a fiber-to-the-home network next to the operator's mobile network, nationwide backbone, and data centers. That combination should let it push farther into convergent products: fixed and mobile services sold together over a single network. The appeal of owning the last mile rather than reselling someone else's network is easy to see.

Macquarie, the Sydney-based asset manager, has been buying data centers and towers while selling Polish fiber. Data Center Dynamics' report also lists three recent digital-infrastructure moves. It created Theseus Infrastructure, a data center operator, with Anthropic and GIC. It agreed to pay $952 million for IHS Towers' Latin American wireless tower operations. And it committed KRW 600 billion with Gabia and its subsidiary KINX to build data centers in South Korea.

The three deals are built differently. Theseus is a data center venture with Anthropic as a partner; an AI company sits inside the same structure as the infrastructure. The IHS Towers purchase is a direct tower acquisition, $952 million for wireless sites in Latin America. The Gabia-KINX commitment finances data center construction in South Korea. The common thread is location: on the compute side of the network, not the last mile.

The fiber sale puts €1 billion of liquidity behind that push. It is also a tidy exit, and a familiar one for private infrastructure managers: fiber's natural buyers are integrated telecom operators who can turn a network into a retail product. Deutsche Telekom, through T-Mobile Polska, is exactly that. Macquarie walks away with proceeds to put into a different digital asset, one whose customers are data center tenants rather than households.

The close is expected at the end of 2026, when T-Mobile Polska starts selling its own fiber. Macquarie's recent buying suggests the €1 billion will not sit idle. Whether data centers generate returns that match an eight-year fiber hold is a question Macquarie's next digital deal will start to answer.