Brookfield's Data Center Firm Csquare Seeks Over $1.3B In IPO

A Brookfield Corp.-backed hyperscaler with 389 megawatts' worth of power is planning to raise up to $1.35B as part of an initial public offering.

Csquare Inc., which has 64 sites in 21 markets, is planning to offer 50 million shares on the public market priced between $23 and $27. Canadian asset management giant Brookfield would retain majority ownership after the IPO, which has a top-range valuation of $4.2B.

The data center operator lost $66M in the three months that ended on March 31, up from $34.9M during the same period a year earlier. The company pulled in $270M in revenue in the first quarter, up 16% from the prior year.

No timeline was offered for the IPO, which would leave Brookfield with a 67.1% stake in the company, which will trade under the ticker symbol CSQR. Csquare didn’t respond to Bisnow’s request for comment on the timing of the IPO on Monday morning.

Ipo plans and use

The company plans to use proceeds from the IPO to pay down its full $734M outstanding revolving credit facility, a $75M promissory note held by Brookfield, and a portion of its $4.3B in asset-backed loans.

Csquare has more than 1,700 enterprise customers at its data centers in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Most of its properties are in the U.S., and its data centers can reach 92% of the U.S. population within 2 milliseconds of latency, the company said in a prospectus filed Monday.

Brookfield made a major investment in October with the cash acquisition of 10 data centers valued at $1B and the merger of data center providers Evoque and Cyxtera into Centersquare. At the time, the company said its portfolio spanned more than 3.5M SF. Those assets were eventually rolled into Csquare, according to the prospectus.

Customer base and mix

Csquare touted its diversified client base in the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that no single customer represented more than 7% of its revenue and that the leading hyperscalers accounted for 11% of its monthly recurring revenue.

Its customer mix is roughly one-third cloud services, 16% toward media and communications, 7% in banking and securities, 7% in healthcare, 9% from internet service providers and the remaining 30% from other sources. It pointed to its high-quality infrastructure, existing presence in core markets, embedded scalability and early-mover advantage on artificial intelligence as tailwinds.

Brookfield Corp. is a Canadian financial giant and parent of New York-based Brookfield Asset Management, the publicly traded behemoth with more than $1T in assets under management that has been recalibrating its portfolio with a push into data centers and a pivot away from office space.

Brookfield and Bloom Energy signed a $5B partnership in October to help develop advanced fuel cell technology as part of the push to generate the power needed for mass adoption of AI.