DigitalBridge Brand Guidelines: Colony Capital’s 1991 Roots, a 2021 Rename & SoftBank

Hotels, a football club and then towers.

DigitalBridge began life as Colony Capital. English Wikipedia records the firm as founded in 1991 by Tom Barrack, and gives Colony Capital as its name until 2021. For most of those three decades it was a real-estate and private-equity investor rather than a specialist in networks.

Wikipedia’s account of the Colony years runs through hotels, sport and entertainment. In July 2005 Colony bought Raffles International, with the Raffles and Swissôtel hotel brands; in January 2006 it bought Fairmont Hotels and Resorts of Toronto with Kingdom Hotels International; and in April 2006 it bought the French football club Paris Saint-Germain. In 2007 it agreed to take Station Casinos private with members of the founding Fertitta family; the casino company filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and, when it emerged in 2011, Colony held a much smaller share. In December 2010 Colony joined a group that bought the film studio Miramax from Disney.

In January 2017 a three-way merger of Colony Capital, NorthStar Asset Management Group and NorthStar Realty Finance created Colony NorthStar, Wikipedia says. The turn to digital infrastructure came two years later. Marc Ganzi, who had founded the tower company Global Tower Partners in Boca Raton in 2003, set up Digital Bridge Holdings with Ben Jenkins in 2013 as an investor in and operator of mobile and internet connectivity businesses. Colony Capital acquired Digital Bridge in 2019, and Ganzi became Colony’s chief executive and president on 1 July 2020, according to English Wikipedia’s article on him.

Towers, data centres, fibre, small cells and the edge.

In 2021 Colony Capital rebranded as DigitalBridge. In December 2021 it sold most of its remaining real-estate holdings, its “Other Equity and Debt” portfolio, to Fortress Investment Group, and in April 2022 it bought out Wafra’s stake in its investment-management arm and switched from a real estate investment trust to an ordinary corporation, English Wikipedia says.

The company’s website describes it as an alternative asset manager “dedicated to investing in digital infrastructure,” working across five areas: data centres, cell towers, fibre networks, small cells and edge infrastructure. It presents itself as both investor and operator, saying its team has operated, built and scaled businesses in each of those areas. In November 2026 its home page carried the headline “Accelerating the AI Revolution.”

Wikipedia lists a run of deals after the rename. In 2022 DigitalBridge agreed to buy AMP Capital’s global infrastructure equity business, completed in February 2023 and renamed InfraBridge; it also announced a deal for Switch, the Las Vegas data-centre company, and bought Telenet’s towers in Belgium. In August 2022 it formed the Asia-Pacific fibre platform Xenith with Columbia Capital, and in 2023, Wikipedia says, it bought 51 per cent of Deutsche Telekom’s tower business. In November 2023 it closed a credit fund, DigitalBridge Credit. In January 2024 it launched Articul8, an enterprise generative-AI company, with Intel, and in June 2024 it led an equity round for Vantage Data Centers with Silver Lake. In October 2024 it agreed to acquire the hyperscale data-centre developer Yondr Group and launched a tender offer for the Japanese telecoms infrastructure company JTOWER.

It also brought outside investors into its portfolio companies. In 2022, Wikipedia says, it sold part of its stake in the data-centre operator DataBank to Swiss Life and EDF Invest, and in September 2023 it completed a recapitalisation of DataBank. In July 2023 the Australian pension fund Aware Super invested in Switch, and in November 2023 DigitalBridge sold 40 per cent of Landmark Dividends to the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

How infrastructure investors present themselves.

Infrastructure investors sell something hard to picture: long-term ownership of things other people use every day. Their websites therefore lean on the assets themselves. Macquarie Asset Management’s pages open on named portfolio companies, from a New Zealand telecoms provider to an onshore wind farm in north-eastern Brazil, and Brookfield Infrastructure sorts its portfolio into utilities, transport, midstream and data, with ports, railways, toll roads and pipelines named as the things it owns and runs.

The language is consistent too. Brookfield Infrastructure speaks of “critical infrastructure” and long-life assets with contracted and regulated revenues; Macquarie Asset Management says it seeks results “over the long term.” Responsible-investment wording sits alongside it: Macquarie’s purchase of the former UK Green Investment Bank in 2017, renamed Green Investment Group, came with a green “special share” held by independent trustees, according to the UK government’s announcement of the sale.

Listed vehicles add another layer of documents. Brookfield Infrastructure publishes quarterly results, supplemental information, letters to unitholders and investor-day presentations, and in 2026 it set out a plan to fold its two listed securities into one. Parent groups publish annual reports and history timelines; Macquarie’s runs from a three-person Sydney office in 1969 to the motorway deal of 1994 that it calls the start of its infrastructure business.

Trade rankings are part of the picture. Infrastructure Investor’s II 100 list of managers placed GIP, by then part of BlackRock, at the top in November 2024, and noted that Macquarie, first in every earlier edition, had dropped to fourth. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it and how it presents its portfolio — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A SoftBank subsidiary run as its own platform.

On 29 December 2025 SoftBank Group announced a definitive agreement to acquire DigitalBridge, saying the deal would strengthen its ability to build, scale and finance the infrastructure needed for next-generation AI services. SoftBank said it completed the acquisition of all of DigitalBridge’s outstanding common stock on 30 September 2026 (US time). DigitalBridge became a controlled subsidiary of SoftBank and continues as a separately managed platform led by Marc Ganzi, SoftBank said; Total Telecom reported on 1 October 2026 that the company had become a fully owned subsidiary that would keep operating independently under its existing chief executive. English Wikipedia adds that the purchase took the company private and off the New York Stock Exchange.

DigitalBridge keeps its headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, and English Wikipedia lists offices in Los Angeles, New York, Denver, London and Singapore. Total Telecom described its holdings as data centres, fibre networks, mobile towers, wireless infrastructure and edge facilities, and said the data centres were of particular interest to SoftBank, which is building its own AI infrastructure. DigitalBridge shares its name with Digital Bridge Holdings, the company Ganzi and Jenkins founded in 2013.

For a design guide, DigitalBridge shows how a long-established investor can take a new name around a new business, then pass to a new owner while keeping that name. Compare Stonepeak and Brookfield Infrastructure, two other infrastructure investors in this series. For this guide we use a deep navy, a signal teal and a pale cable grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep DigitalBridge’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.