Blackstone takes majority stake in Winthrop Technologies

Blackstone agreed in April 2024 to acquire 50.7% of Winthrop Technologies, investing through Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and affiliated funds, at an enterprise value reported at €500M–1.5bn, an EV/EBITDA multiple of 5x–12x. The remaining shares stayed with the existing holders, among them founder Barry English, and chief executive Anne Dooley continued to lead the business. Headquartered in Dublin, Winthrop Technologies builds data centres on a turnkey basis. It takes responsibility for the electrical distribution, cooling and mechanical systems alongside the structure, and hands over a building ready to receive servers. Its customers are hyperscale operators, cloud providers and colocation companies across Europe. Revenue amounted to €1–10bn with an EBITDA of €100–200M. Turnkey delivery distinguishes the business from general construction. A data centre is defined by its power and cooling rather than its shell, and an operator commissioning one wants a single contractor accountable for whether the systems work, not a main contractor coordinating specialists. Few firms in Europe hold that capability at scale, and the operators building across the continent return to those that do. The company had withdrawn from all other construction. Its final non-data centre projects completed during the year to April 2023, by which point revenue had risen 55% to pass one billion euros for the first time and pre-tax profit had increased almost sixfold to 86.2 million. It employed 654 people, held 130.9 million euros of cash and was building five data centres in Dublin, one of them for an American hyperscale client. Demand follows the capital expenditure of a small number of technology companies, whose spending on computing capacity has risen with artificial intelligence workloads, and which require far more power per square metre than earlier generations of facility.

The acquisition of Winthrop Technologies is part of the growth strategy of Blackstone, which already has several external growth operations under its belt, notably Rover Group in 2024.