May 13 (Reuters) – A newly formed Blackstone data center real estate investment trust has raised $1.75 billion in its U.S. initial public offering, it said on Wednesday.
Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust, which will focus on acquiring newly constructed data centers, sold 87.5 million shares in the IPO at $20 apiece.
Artificial intelligence-linked companies have spearheaded the U.S. IPO market this year, as investors bet on strong growth expectations from wider adoption of the technology.
The new Blackstone vehicle plans to target data centers worth $250 million to $1.5 billion leased to investment-grade hyperscale tenants in markets such as Northern Virginia, Ohio, Phoenix, Maryland and Austin.
It has identified and reviewed roughly $25 billion in near-term opportunities in established data markets.
Data centers provide necessary infrastructure for storing, processing and analyzing vast troves of information crucial for training AI models.
AI spending by Big Tech is now set to surpass $700 billion this year, up from around $600 billion previously, as they pour record sums into building an infrastructure to support complex, high-stake tasks.
Blackstone, the world’s biggest alternative asset manager, is a prolific investor in data centers and digital infrastructure. Its portfolio comprises more than $150 billion in data center assets globally.
The company took data center operator QTS Realty Trust private in 2021 in a roughly $10 billion deal.
A Blackstone affiliate had indicated interest in investing up to $200 million in the offering. Each IPO investor was offered bonus shares equivalent to 1% of their investment as a sweetener.
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, BofA Securities, Deutsche Bank Securities, J.P. Morgan, RBC Capital Markets and Wells Fargo Securities acted as joint lead book-running managers for the IPO.
Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “BXDC” on Thursday.
(Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil and Disha Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
