Investment giant BlackRock has acquired a majority stake in German data center firm Mainova WebHouse.
German energy firm the Mainova Group this week announced it had sold 50.1 percent of its shares in Mainova WebHouse GmbH to a fund managed by BlackRock's Diversified Infrastructure Team. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Mainova said the deal would open up new growth potential for data centers in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region.
“Mainova WebHouse has successfully established itself in the market for data centers. We are proud of the already visible success through the construction of our first data center campus, the use of our two data centers by a renowned customer and this forward-looking partnership,” said Mainova WebHouse managing director Oliver Schiebel. “The support of Mainova and BlackRock will allow us to significantly expand our presence in Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region in the future and to meet the demand for sustainable data centers.”
First established in January 2021, Mainova WebHouse GmbH is a wholly-owned subsidiary of local utility Mainova. The company is developing a 30MW data center campus in the Seckbach area of Frankfurt and a 20MW site south of Frankfurt in Langen. The company broke ground on a second 10MW building at the Seckbach campus earlier this year.
The company is also partnering with US real estate firm Tishman Speyer to develop a 32MW data center in the Ostend/Osthafen area of Frankfurt on a site previously occupied by industrial firm Samson.
In addition to the data center under construction in Ostend, the company said there are already data center projects with an IT load of more than 200MW in the company's pipeline.
Michael Maxelon, CEO of Mainova AG, said: “We are delighted that we have been able to gain a partner in BlackRock that allows us to develop the data center location in the Rhine-Main metropolitan area in the long term and, above all, sustainably. With our strong partnership, we are further pushing digitalization and strengthening value creation in the region. With their specific sustainability focus, the data centers of the Mainova WebHouse support the city of Frankfurt and our customers in achieving their climate protection goals.”
BlackRock has a number of digital infrastructure investments. After acquiring Global Infrastructure Partners earlier this year, the company took over major stakes in CyrusOne and Vantage Towers (and has provided Vantage Data Centers with loans). BlackRock has also invested in GPU cloud firm CoreWeave and tower firm Phoenix Tower and partnered with AT&T on fiber projects.
“Headed by an experienced management team, Mainova WebHouse is an example of our thematic and partnership approach to infrastructure investments,” said Mark Florian, global head of diversified infrastructure at BlackRock. “We are working together to ensure that customers focused on the energy transition can benefit from sustainably designed data centers based on an energy supply in sustainable design. In this way, we are helping to make the Frankfurt region one of the world’s leading data hubs.”
