Asset manager Blue Owl Capital is reportedly in talks to acquire digital infrastructure investor IPI Partners — the parent company of data center firms Stack Infrastructure and RadiusDC.
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The potential deal is valued at around $1B, Bloomberg reported. While the acquisition could be finalized as early as this month, the terms of the deal are still being hammered out and there remains the potential for it to fall apart.
Headquartered in Chicago, IPI Partners is a joint venture of Iconiq Capital and Iron Point Partners. The group created wholesale data center developer Stack Infrastructure in 2019, launching with a portfolio that combined three data centers that once operated under the Infomart banner with a number of facilities from T5, a firm in which IPI was a major investor.
Stack Infrastructure now has 4 gigawatts of facilities either in operation or in its development pipeline, according to datacenters.com. The Denver-based firm has 30 data centers globally, with a U.S. footprint that includes properties in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Northern Virginia, Portland and Silicon Valley. Stack announced plans for its newest U.S. facility in April: a 220-megawatt campus south of Dallas that is slated for six data centers totaling 1.5M SF on a 100-acre site.
IPI’s other data center holding is RadiusDC, a small interconnection-focused edge data center firm that operates facilities in Denver and Miami.
Blue Owl is a relative newcomer to the data center sector, but should its acquisition of IPI go through, it would be the firm’s second data center-focused deal since late summer.
In August, Blue Owl partnered with American Real Estate Partners-owned PowerHouse Data Centers and Chirisa Technology Parks in a joint venture to build large-scale data centers for artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave. The partnership said it could eventually deploy as much as $5B to build AI data centers for CoreWeave and other customers.
While Blue Owl, a New York firm with more than $192B in assets under management, has only recently begun investing in the data center industry, it has expanded significantly through acquisitions over the past year. Just last week, Blue Owl completed the acquisition of investment firm Atalaya Capital Management. This followed the acquisition of Kuvare Asset Management and Prima Capital Advisors earlier this year.
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