Brockton Capital has bought a majority stake in a data centre company through its £1bn Brockton Capital Fund II.
David Marks’ and Jason Blank’s private equity fund management firm expects to invest up to £100m in Virtus Data Centres over the next two to three years, including an initial outlay to take control of the fledgling business.
Chief executive Michael Hall will continue to run the business, which is chaired by Conservative politician and business figure Steve Norris.
The aim is to grow the mid-market operator into one of the primary UK data centre operators.
“We plan to grow it into a £500m business by funding a series of UK data centre developments,” Blank said.
Virtus currently operates one data centre, in Enfield, which opened in March. It was backed by investment manager Frogmore’s second fund, which will remain involved for a second phase of the Enfield scheme.
Virtus has retained a minority stake in the Enfield data centre.
It has also recently bought a brownfield site in Hayes, west London, for a new-build data centre of about 50,000 sq ft. Subject to local planning permission, this is expected to become operational in the second quarter of 2013.
Brockton’s second fund raised £400m of equity from mainly institutional investors, including Hermes and LMS Capital, at a first close in 2010.
