PIMCO launches £257M European data centre fund

Fixed income asset management firm, PIMCO, has reportedly raised £257.3 million ($325 million) for a Europe-focused data centre fund.

The figure includes seed funding from PIMCO’s parent company Allianz Group, and brings the fund halfway to its targeted total amount of £643.7 million ($813 million).

Mobile Europe reported the fund will be focused on investments in European hyperscale projects and could surpass the targeted total and raise up to £831.4 million ($1.05 billion).

Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager at PIMCO, Kirill Zavodov, said the company sees data centres as a ‘secular growth theme globally’ and so it will be making both debt and equity investments in the US and Europe.

“In Europe, we see the opportunity set as more attractive compared to the US as the market is more under-supplied and lagging the US by approximately five years as it relates to the installed data centre capacity,” said Zavodov, as reported in Mobile Europe.

Zavodov added with tier two and tier three markets ‘even further behind’, this is where PIMCO expects to see ‘most of the growth opportunity to play out over the coming years’.

PIMCO’s new fund will likely be financing projects through its subsidiary, Apto, first announced last September. Apto executives include former leaders from established data centre companies including Equinix, Digital Realty, and AWS.

“Apto is not just a company. It is a promise to partner with the world’s largest hyperscalers as they build out the next wave of Europe’s fast-growing digital economy,” said Russell Poole, CEO at Apto.

In December, a disclosure document submitted by PIMCO to European regulators focused on sustainability initiatives for PIMCO data centres. In the document, the company stated goals including a power usage effectiveness (PUE) below 1.35x and a Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) building certification of very good or higher.

The announcement of the new data centre fund comes shortly after the company hired Bank of America’s Giorgio Cocini as Managing Director, Head of Business in Italy, Iberia, and France.

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