(Bloomberg) – Blackrock plans to invest up to £ 500 million in a little explored segment of the UK market, a commitment announced while CEO Larry Fink prepares to accompany US President Donald Trump on his official visit to the country.
The asset manager has acquired land in western London that will serve as the basis for a new partnership with the Data Centers Gravity Edge operator, according to a statement. The so-called Digital Gravity Partners will seek to buy existing data centers with underused capacity, said Thomas Mueller-Borja, Blackrock’s global real estate co-chief, in an interview.
The world’s largest investors are betting heavily on data centers, believing that the rapid growth and adoption of artificial intelligence will generate growing demand for the infrastructure needed to support it. This has led several of the world’s largest alternative active managers to aggressively seek large facilities to meet the demand of so -called “hyper climbers” such as Amazon (), Microsoft () and Google, Alphabet () Amazon ().
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However, electricity costs in the UK are among the highest in Europe, while the country’s power grid faces difficulties to keep up with the demand.
“We are trying to find existing assets that are underused but have available energy,” Mueller-Borja explained. “We are not developing scratch for hyper climbers.”
The initial investment of more than £ 100 million will be made from the European Property Fund VI, a European fund of € 1.2 billion that concluded it to capture in July. Investing in smaller facilities that serve corporate customers also expands the public of potential buyers for retired properties, unlike large projects aimed at hyper -climbing, which require billions in capital spending.
“We are always very focused on liquidity on the way out,” said Paul Tebbit, another Blackrock global real estate co-chief. “One of the attractive things of this strategy, given the size of the lots we are creating, is that real estate funds or infrastructure funds can be the final buyers.”
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Blackrock chief Larry Fink is among a select group of Wall Street tycoons and Silicon Valley executives who will accompany Trump on the UK’s official visit this week, when they will announce billions in transionic investments. Sky News had already released Blackrock’s plans.
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