Blue Owl据称拟将约65亿美元数据中心资产注入新REIT并推动上市

Blue Owl Capital is seeking to create a real estate investment trust for data centers and take it public, according to people familiar with the matter, as more companies tap the market to fund building out artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The alternative asset manager expects to seed the REIT with about $6.5 billion of its own data center assets, one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private. The company would plan to raise money through an initial public offering and additional share sales to snap up data centers and build out a portfolio, the people said.

Blue Owl has a range of data center assets, and closed its most recent digital infrastructure fund in May with $7 billion of commitments. Deliberations are ongoing and details of the REIT and the initial public offering could change, the people said.

A flood of spending on AI infrastructure is drawing numerous data center companies backed by large investment firms into the IPO market. Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust Inc., which raised $2 billion in its May debut, was structured as a blind pool, with investors buying shares in the REIT without knowing what assets it would hold. A listing for Brookfield-backed Csquare Inc. pulled in $1.2 billion in July.

The new vehicle would be similar to Blackstone’s blind-pool REIT, though it will start with the initial assets as an anchor, the people said. Other asset managers have been studying the prospects of vehicles similar to Blackstone’s after its debut, some of the people said.

A representative for Blue Owl declined to comment.

Annual global data center capital expenditure could increase to over $1.2 trillion by 2028 from $421 billion last year, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Steven Tseng and Rebecca Wang wrote in August.

Blue Owl has more than $319 billion of assets under management across credit, real assets and strategic capital, according to its website. Stack Infrastructure Inc., a data center company owned by Blue Owl with data centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia, is considering options including a sale of its Asia operations in a transaction that could be valued at more than $30 billion, Bloomberg News reported.

Read More: Blue Owl’s Stack Is Said to Consider $30 Billion Asia Sale

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