Blackstone plans to launch a publicly traded data center acquisition company, with its sights set on tens of billions of dollars of funding, Bloomberg reports.
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The acquisition company will buy already built and leased data centers, rather than land or projects under development, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources. Blackstone will first try to raise money for the new company from sovereign wealth funds and other institutions, but it intends to eventually offer opportunities to millions of everyday investors.
The investment vehicle could launch as soon as this year, but Blackstone is still determining the entity’s structure, and it would have to secure regulatory approval. The publicly traded company would compete with Digital Realty Trust and Equinix, other data center REITs.
Blackstone, which has $1.3T of assets under management, calls itself the leading investor in data centers and power infrastructure.
“The historic pace of investment taking place in the U.S. to facilitate the development of artificial intelligence … is the key driver of economic growth today and is creating an enormous need for capital solutions,” Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said during an earnings call last month.
The design and manufacture of semiconductors, the expansion of power generation, and data center construction are facilitating that growth, he said. The data center sector is experiencing an “infrastructure investment supercycle” that will require up to $3T of digital infrastructure by 2030, according to JLL.
Blackstone took private QTS Realty Trust, an owner and operator of data centers in North America and Europe, in a $10B deal in 2021. QTS expanded more than eightfold in the years following, with a $70B portfolio and a $100B prospective data center pipeline in late 2024.
Last year, the investment giant refinanced 10 QTS data centers with a $3.5B CMBS loan and refinanced two other data centers with a $1.5B CMBS loan.
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