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Blackstone’s new data center real estate investment trust raised $1.75B in its U.S. stock market debut Thursday, with underwriters able to consider raising the proceeds of its initial public offering an additional $250M.
Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust is targeting the acquisition of newly built data centers occupied by hyperscalers and valued between $250M and $1.5B, Bloomberg reported. The REIT sold 87.5 million shares at a fixed price of $20 per share.
Underwriters of the REIT have 30 days from the IPO to lift the proceeds it can raise to $2B, Seeking Alpha reported.
Blackstone has identified around $25B in potential near-term data center purchases in key U.S. markets like Northern Virginia, Ohio, Phoenix, Maryland and Austin, according to Seeking Alpha.
Blackstone’s REIT reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month that it anticipated returns of between 5.75% and 7% or more and planned to grant IPO investors additional shares — trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BXDC — equal to 1% of their investment amount.
The IPO comes as more investors, especially on the institutional side, continue to pile in on data center investments amid the artificial intelligence boom, which is demanding more data center compute and power capacity globally.
Private equity pumped more than $45B in 2025 into U.S. data centers, the highest total in five years, and more than 70% of the overall $63.35B invested in the space, S&P Global Market Intelligence reported.
This prompted JLL Vice Chairman Curt Holcomb to declare that the industry was at the start of a “supercycle development process,” where demand significantly outstripped supply.
That investment appetite doesn’t appear to be waning in 2026.
More than half of investors surveyed by CBRE for its annual data center investment intentions report say they would increase their outlay for the asset class by as much as 10% this year, with 55% saying they would increase investment even more.
Half of those surveyed say they wanted investments in turnkey-wholesale, hyperscale and powered-shell centers.
The U.S. tallied nearly 4,000 data centers as of Q3 2025, according to S&P, with more than 2,600 operational, 265 under construction and 1,100 planned.
Blackstone has yet to identify any purchases, and its BXDC fund is the largest blind pool — a fund that raises money before targeting specific investments — ever set up, according to Bloomberg.
BXDC also could provide liquidity to developers and data center operators seeking to cash out on their projects amid a slump in sales in 2025, Bisnow previously reported.
With more than $1.3T in assets under management, Blackstone inked $225B in data center transactions since 2018.
The new REIT fund is the latest push by Blackstone into the data center market. It acquired data center developer and operator QTS Realty Trust for $10B in 2021 and Asia Pacific region data center provider AirTrunk three years later at a $24B valuation.
The IPO was led by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo. The fund is led by former Link Logistics Chief Investment Officer Nick Pell.
Some analysts have flagged risks in the data center industry despite, or perhaps because of, its runaway growth, EY-Parthenon principal Gordon Bell told S&P Global.
“Execution risk is probably the largest risk that I see for the industry. The industry has signed up and committed to a build-out at a scale and speed that we’ve never seen before. No operator has executed that before,” Bell told the S&P.
Shares of BXDC fell a little more than 1.5% to $19.68 around midday trading.
