European private capital firms target €17bn in data centre deals

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Private capital firms are seeking to cash in on the US-driven artificial intelligence boom, launching €17bn of European data centre sales in a matter of weeks.

Oaktree Capital Management has started a process to offload part of its European and Middle Eastern data centre business Pure DC, which is valued at up to €5bn in total, while Swiss private equity investor Partners Group is seeking as much as €4bn from a sale of Nordic data centre operator atNorth, people familiar with the proposed transactions said.

Swedish buyout firm EQT has already launched a sale of GlobalConnect, its Nordic superfast broadband network and data centre business, at a potential valuation of €8bn. The pace of dealmaking is picking up as the prospect of long-term contracted revenues draws investors, while the assets’ owners seek funding for infrastructure upgrades.

The potential transactions come as BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners is in advanced talks to buy Texas-based Aligned Data Centers from Macquarie, in a deal that could be valued at nearly $40bn.

Other European groups selling down their data centre holdings include Deutsche Bank’s asset manager DWS, which wants to raise about €2bn from the sale of its data centre business NorthC. Telecoms group Orange is looking to sell a stake in several data centres in France, according to people familiar with the process.

Burkhard Koep, JPMorgan’s head of media and telecoms for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said the general interest in data centre deals showed that “some of these platforms are outgrowing their existing owners and new investors with deeper pockets are stepping in to fund their multibillion cloud and AI infrastructure pipelines”.

Oaktree has not yet determined the size of the stake it will sell in Pure, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, while another person said it was too early to put a valuation on the data centres being offloaded by the French group Orange.

There have been 162 data centre-oriented M&A deals worth more than $46bn that have closed across the world this year, while another 45 worth about $35bn have been agreed but not yet completed, according to Synergy Research Group.

Last year, 287 deals closed worth more than $77bn, eclipsing all previous years, according to the research firm. That record could be matched as cloud providers and companies race to capitalise on the opportunity to sell assets. Deals in Europe, Middle East and Africa typically account for 10 to 15 per cent of the global total value.

“We do not forecast this M&A activity, but it is certainly possible that deal value in 2025 could match or come close to the record level seen in 2024,” said John Dinsdale, Synergy’s chief analyst. 

“What’s driving it? The usual — an insatiable appetite for data centre capacity, the need to keep on building new data centres, and the inability of current data centre operators to fund those investments internally.”

He added that potential buyers viewed data centres as “a safe bet for investments, so money is flooding into the market.”

Orange, Oaktree, Partners Group, atNorth and Pure all declined to comment.