Blue Owl Capital, an alternative asset manager with more than $319 billion in assets under management, is planning to form a data center REIT and take it public. The REIT would be seeded with a Blue Owl portfolio valued at around $6.5 billion, with proceeds from the IPO and additional share sales used to acquire more data centers. Blue Owl's existing data center investments include a $3 billion equity commitment to Meta's Hyperion project in Louisiana, a facility expected to deliver five gigawatts of computational power for AI by 2030.
Investors not disclosed
The planned IPO adds Blue Owl to a small but growing list of major alternative asset managers, including Blackstone and Brookfield, racing to structure data center holdings as publicly traded REITs, signaling that institutional capital is increasingly treating AI infrastructure as a distinct and scalable asset class. Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust filed for an IPO in May targeting approximately $1.75 billion; Blue Owl's entry with a $6.5 billion seed portfolio suggests the competitive pressure to lock in public-market capital for data center acquisitions is intensifying. Blue Owl also separately holds a stake in Stack Infrastructure, which is reportedly being evaluated for a sale at a valuation exceeding $30 billion, making the REIT launch one piece of a broader repositioning around data center assets.