Motivic infinite cyclic covers

We associate with an infinite cyclic cover of a punctured neighborhood of a simple normal crossing divisor on a complex quasi-projective manifold (assuming certain finiteness conditions are satisfied) an element in the Grothendieck ring $K_0({\rm Var}^{\hat \mu}_{\mathbb{C}})$, which we call {\it motivic infinite cyclic cover}, and show its birational invariance. Our construction provides a unifying approach for the Denef-Loeser motivic Milnor fibre of a complex hypersurface singularity germ, and the motivic Milnor fiber of a rational function, respectively.