Starwood Invests $850M in Echelon Data Centres

Starwood Capital Group has invested approximately $850 million in Irish-based Echelon Data Centres through its affiliates Starwood Opportunity Fund XII and Starwood Real Estate Income Trust, acquiring a 50% share in the company.

Echelon founded in 2016 and has evolved to become one of the largest data center developers in Ireland and the U.K., providing large-scale facilities to support data and computing resources. The company now has 140MW of capacity that is either operating or in late-stage construction, including a 91.4MW hyperscale facility in Dublin.

The Starwood investment values Echelon at about €2.5 billion, and the company’s capitalization is expected to expand thanks to a new €900 million loan facility granted by Morgan Stanley and United Overseas Bank.

“We are confident that with the Echelon team and Starwood Digital Ventures we will continue to find further opportunities to deploy capital into transactions with attractive risk adjusted returns for our investors, both in Europe and the United States, where we have an additional 600MW of projects in our pipeline, bringing our total global platform to about 1.5GW,” said Barry Sternlicht, Chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital.

Miami-based Starwood Capital has invested nearly $8 billion over the last five years across 1.5 GW of capacity, cementing its position as one of the top privately held data center developers in the U.S. and Europe. The company recently established Starwood Digital Ventures to manage its global data center investment strategy and activities.

Starwood has raised more than $75 billion in capital since its founding in 1991, and it currently manages around $115 billion of assets. On a global scale, the firm has invested in nearly every type of real estate through numerous opportunity funds and Starwood Real Estate Income Trust (SREIT).