The data centre boom will continue to accelerate

Author: Jessica Pereira

The data centre market, which has been expanding for a long time, has continued to gather pace over the past five years and has become a veritable boom.

Cloud providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft, Google and Oracle are the main drivers of the ever-increasing demand. As a result, data centres have now become an attractive and high-performance investment alternative to traditional commercial real estate. Against the backdrop of advancing digitalisation in all areas of life and the economy, not least in what is perhaps the most important growth market of artificial intelligence (AI), the demand for data centres will continue to increase in the coming years. At the same time, investor interest will also grow noticeably, so there is much to suggest that data centres will have the greatest growth potential of all asset classes in terms of capital values over the next one to two years.

As early as 2000, BNP Paribas Real Estate recognised the long-term opportunities and prospects of this market and established a separate division that focuses exclusively on the data centre asset class, as well as operators, end users and investors. Even during the dotcom boom up to 2005, BNP Paribas Real Estate brokered numerous transactions through the sale of properties in Europe. Over the past 10 years, the Data Center Solutions team has not only confirmed the market leadership it has built up over many years in Germany but has also significantly expanded it. Since 2018, the division, which is led by Arno Petzold in Germany and comprises seven consultants across the country, has advised on a total of 26 sales of green and brownfield sites to data centre developers and operators in Frankfurt and Berlin with a total area of around 875,000m² and a transaction volume of over €860 million.

In the two most important German markets for data centres, Frankfurt and Berlin, BNP Paribas Real Estate has been involved in almost all brokered transactions in this market segment. In the Frankfurt market area alone, the property consultant has advised on and brokered 21 transactions in the past five years. These transactions played a key role in Frankfurt-Sossenheim becoming the new hotspot of the data centre market; All the data centre project sites developed there for CyrusOne (formerly Zenium), Digital Realty Trust and Colt were brokered by the Data Center Solutions team.

Other landmark transactions included the two mandates of BEOS AG for the sale of the Osthafen IT and business park on Frankfurt’s Ratswegkreisel and the implementation of a structured bidding process for the partial sale of a data centre project site in the FRANKFURT WESTSIDE development area for a project company of BEOS and Swiss Life Asset Managers in FrankfurtGriesheim. BNP Paribas Real Estate also brokered the site of the former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Liederbach am Taunus near Frankfurt (which Coca-Cola closed last summer after more than 50 years) to Stack Infrastructure. Four data centre construction phases with a planned capacity of 80 MVA are being built on an area of around 70,000m².

The Data Center Solutions team is currently working on over a dozen other projects throughout Germany. The challenge is to find suitable plots of land for the customers, among other things, with the ability to obtain planning permission, the availability of electricity or the utilisation of waste heat. The specialists at BNP Paribas Real Estate can draw on many years of experience and their corresponding, highly complex knowledge of the market.