Oaktree Quietly Builds £600M-Plus Data Centre Platform

Data centres are one of the hottest asset classes in the world right now, and while private equity peers have been quick to trumpet their investments in the sector, Oaktree Capital Management has been building a below-the-radar data centre platform for the past few years — and is set on expansion. 

Pure Data Centres last week hired Marco Fok as senior director of investments and portfolio management, based in London. Fok was previously head of portfolio management at Mileway, the European last-mile logistics business set up by Blackstone.

The business was set up by founder Martin Lynch in 2015 and has been backed by Oaktree since 2020. Dame Dawn Childs is the chief executive, and property banking veteran Simon Berrill is the executive chairman.

It has sites in London, Dublin, Tokyo, Indonesia and Abu Dhabi, with the potential for 300 megavolt-amperes of capacity when built out. It concentrates on hyperscale data centres.

Pure had £586M of assets — £171M of completed buildings, £366M of assets under construction and £48M of plant and machinery — according to 2022 accounts filed in autumn last year, the most recent public information on the company.

As those assets are completed, the value is likely to rise. 

The London site is in Borehamwood, about 15 miles from central London. As of the end of 2022, it was the only one of the company’s sites that was operational, and it produced £5M of revenue. 

When fully built out, it has the potential to offer 150 MVA of capacity. The company had drawn down £173M of a £470M senior debt facility in place to build out the London campus as of late 2022. 

The company also had £314M of shareholders loans, most likely the investment in the company provided by Oaktree. 

Blackstone and Starwood have made major investments in the data centre sector in the past year, as has Brookfield, which owns a majority stake in Oaktree.