ActivumSG, a leading pan-European real estate private equity manager, has on behalf of ActivumSG Fund VI, sold a 190,000 square feet plot of land in Meco, Madrid to Pure DC.
The site sits within the Madrid-to-Barcelona transport corridor, one of Spain and Europe’s most economically significant regions.
It will be home to Pure DC’s first data centre in Spain.
Madrid is considered a highly sought-after data centre market with strong supply-demand dynamics and is comparably underdeveloped relative to other major European cities such as London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.
ActivumSG acquired the site in July 2021 from two local manufacturing companies. The acquisition followed an extensive analysis of the Madrid Municipality Electricity Grid to identify areas most suited to data centre development.
ActivumSG secured the signing of a 25MW power agreement in 2022 to allow the connection of power cables from a nearby electric substation and was granted the dual feed in 2023.
Tech-Stone, a Madrid-based real estate development and asset management firm involved throughout the process, will continue to manage the delivery of the scheme for Pure DC.
The transaction is ActivumSG’s first powered land sale. The manager sees further opportunity in acquiring strategically located sites where additional value can be unlocked through preparing them for data centre development before selling them to a specialist operator.
“There is a huge opportunity in powered land plays as they help solve a pressing issue: a growing requirement for sites suitable for data centre development, which are needed to support the significant expected investment into emerging technologies such as AI,” said Brian Betel, Head of Direct Asset Transactions, ActivumSG.
“However, while not taking on development risk or the operational complexity of running a data centre, for a successful powered land play, you still need hands-on local expertise and relationships. ActivumSG has an extensive network of in-country teams across Europe to support sourcing and delivery of similar projects,” Betel added.
Saul Goldstein, CEO, ActivumSG, said: “This deal is a perfect demonstration of our Spanish teams’ creativity. We have capitalised on the growing interest of global data centre operators in Madrid by bringing power to land situated in a highly advantageous location for data centre development, allowing us to achieve a high exit multiple and deliver strong returns for our investors in an otherwise subdued transactional environment.
“However, we are not solely focused on disposals, and remain active on the acquisition side, with a significant dry powder to deploy in Fund VII and an opportunistic mandate to take advantage of current market dislocation,” said Goldstein.
“Our expansion into Madrid allows us to serve a growing European market and to further extend our global portfolio of data centres,” Dawn Childs, CEO, Pure DC, said. “We are excited about working with partners in Spain to deliver another next-generation data centre campus which can help to satisfy the increasing need for data storage and processing power.”
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