Alternative investment management company Blackstone continues to expand its data center empire, with its portfolio reaching $70 billion.

The company also has another $100bn in its prospective pipeline. That’s up from a portfolio of $55bn and pipeline of $70bn just last quarter.

The biggest part of the portfolio’s growth comes from Blackstone’s acquisition of AirTrunk for AU$24bn (US$16bn) in September.

“Today, Blackstone is the largest data center provider in the world with holdings across the US, Europe, India, and Japan,” Blackstone CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman said in an earnings call.

“Last month, we announced another major expansion by agreeing to acquire AirTrunk, the largest data center operator in the Asia Pacific region for $16 billion. We were uniquely positioned to execute on this investment, given our expertise in this sector, the scale of our capital, the global integration of our teams, and our connectivity to the world’s largest data center customers.”

He added: “We’ve conceptualized this new business area, built conviction, and in only three years, scaled it to the largest platform in the world. And there is much more we’re doing and plan to do in this area, including addressing the sector’s growing power needs, which we believe will create enormous additional opportunities for investment over time.”

CFO Michael Chae said that the data center platform remained the single largest driver of appreciation in its infrastructure real estate businesses and for the firm overall in the third quarter.

President and COO Jonathan Gray said that “the fact that we have large-scale pools of capital that we’ve been able to deploy has been a huge competitive advantage,” adding that “it does require a lot of capital to both buy these companies and then have the firepower to build these out.”

Since acquiring QTS for $10bn in 2021, “we’ve grown eightfold in lease capacity,” Gray said.

“And so it’s clearly the data centers, but it’s also the energy and power. And in that area, again, having infrastructure, having our energy credit funds, having our energy equity funds, that consortium, and even some of this that’s gone into real estate and then what we’re doing in credit, that’s another area.”

He added: “In the energy area, we estimate we were a lead financing provider for nearly 15 percent of all renewable projects in the US in the last 12 months.”

As well as QTS and AirTrunk, Blackstone has myriad data center investments including in Vnet, Lumina CloudInfra, Copeland, Park Place Technologies, and Winthrop Technologies, alongside joint ventures with COPT, Digital Realty, and others.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/blackstones-prospective-data-center-pipeline-hits-100bn-on-top-of-70bn-portfolio/