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Blue Owl Capital is launching a new venture that will develop, own and operate fiber networks in an effort to capitalize on the data center boom.
Funds managed by Blue Owl announced the creation of Kirkwood Infrastructure Group to carry out the development and operation of new communications infrastructure. The organization will serve hyperscalers, data center operators, communications providers and community-level networks, according to a Wednesday release.
Kirkwood has already integrated the operations of South Reach Networks, a fiber infrastructure company acquired by Blue Owl last year. That includes about 400 miles of network and 40 data centers, as well as undersea cable landing stations.
The company is also planning 200 miles of conduit and high-capacity fiber across Louisiana and Mississippi.
“The digital infrastructure buildout in the U.S. is just beginning, and while a new company, our team has a tremendous track record of deploying industry-leading network infrastructure that enables the next wave of compute requirements and digital transformation,” Kirkwood CEO Scott Bergs said in the release.
Bergs was previously CEO of South Reach Networks.
Investors have plowed trillions of dollars into data center infrastructure in the last three years, both to construct the facilities themselves and the underlying networks that support them. The exploding pace of artificial intelligence adoption has generated demand that Goldman Sachs predicts will lead to $7.6T in investment by big tech companies by 2031.
Blue Owl has previously provided financing for data center construction, including an August 2025 partnership with Pimco to invest $29B in Meta data centers in Louisiana. Blue Owl contributed $3B to that deal, with Pimco supplying the rest.
In June, Blue Owl provided nearly $1B to recapitalize a data center project in Northern Virginia.
But Blue Owl was caught up in a March stock sell-off that spawned from broader market fears about the concentration of AI-related risk in the private credit sector. The company has yet to recover from the rout, with Thursday shares trading down 40% compared to the beginning of the year.
Two Blue Owl private credit funds received the industry’s largest quantity of redemption requests in the second quarter, causing the company to cap withdrawals, Bloomberg reported. The company also had industry-high redemption requests in the first quarter at $5.4B across the two funds. That number declined slightly to $4.7B in Q2.
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