Blue Owl is weighing a real estate investment trust dedicated to data centers and aiming to float it, people with knowledge of the matter said. Those people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private, also said the plan is still being hashed out and the REIT and IPO details could shift.
The company is expected to seed the new REIT with roughly $6.5 billion of data center properties it already owns, then tap the public markets for more cash via an IPO followed by additional stock sales to acquire more sites and scale the portfolio. The concept is akin to Blackstone's blind-pool REIT, but with a key difference: Blue Owl would begin with a defined set of assets as an anchor. After Blackstone's debut, other asset managers have been examining similar structures.
The surge in spending to support artificial intelligence is pushing more data center platforms backed by big investors toward the IPO window. Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust Inc. raised $2 billion when it listed in May in a blind-pool format, meaning investors bought in without a disclosed asset list. In July, Brookfield-backed Csquare Inc. drew $1.2 billion in its offering. In an August report, Bloomberg Intelligence's Steven Tseng and Rebecca Wang said worldwide yearly data center spending could top $1.2 trillion by 2028, compared with $421 billion in the prior year.
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Blue Owl's stock rose as much as 1.2% after Bloomberg News reported the plans. The shares are still down nearly 21% year to date, valuing the firm at more than $18 billion. In May, the firm closed its newest digital infrastructure fund with $7 billion in commitments and says on its website that it oversees more than $319 billion spanning credit, real assets, and strategic capital. Blue Owl owns Stack Infrastructure Inc., a data center operator with facilities across the Americas, Europe and Asia that is weighing options including a potential sale of its Asia business in a deal that could exceed $30 billion, Bloomberg News reported. A Blue Owl representative declined to comment.
