00:00Blackstone selling a stake in a trio of data centers across northern Virginia for three and a half billion dollars.
00:07The assets involved are part of a joint venture between Blackstone and Digital Realty,
00:11which will continue working together on the remaining data center investments elsewhere.
00:15Bloomberg's Anthony Hughes joins us for the latest.
00:18Anthony, what are the details of this transaction?
00:20Well, it was really interesting timing this deal.
00:22It happened right at the end of the quarter or in the end of the half.
00:24And basically for Blackstone, that enables them to basically realize these stakes in these data centers.
00:33And now it's sort of unusual in a sense because Blackstone's been a huge buyer of data centers,
00:39but here we're actually seeing them sell stakes in data centers in Virginia,
00:41which is the biggest market for data centers in the U.S.
00:45But Digital Realty, which is one of the largest REITs, one of the largest data center REITs,
00:49they have a big appetite to buy these data centers, particularly when they're complete and they're stabilized.
00:52They're actually generating revenue.
00:54Blackstone is really developing a lot of data centers.
00:58It also has some funds that are looking to buy completed data centers as well.
01:03So, you know, so from Digital Realty's perspective, they're buying, their main business is data centers.
01:08So they're buying some more.
01:09They're doing it in an accretive way.
01:11And Blackstone here sold these stakes.
01:15It was sort of a capital recycling exercise for them right at the quarter end.
01:19We'll help their results.
01:22But, yeah, it was a sort of unusually timed deal.
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