TARGETS THE EUROPEAN MARKET

New York headquartered investment firm KKR and data center entrepreneur Franek Sodzawiczny, has today announced the formation of a data center platform Global Technical Realty (GTR).

Set to be a build-to-suit and roll-up acquisition data center platform in Europe, GTR has partnered with Mercury Engineering, a European engineering contractor to design and develop a data center product that specifically targets the hyperscale cloud service markets.

“The data center market in Europe presents a unique opportunity to invest behind the secular trend of increased cloud services adoption and demand for data,” said Waldemar Szlezak, managing director of KKR.

Andrew Peisch, director of KKR, added, “The 25 years of industry experience that Franek brings to the table, alongside the rest of the management team, is impressive and exactly the kind of know-how we sought out to invest in the sector.”

Franek Sodzawiczny is the founder and CEO of GTR while KKR is the major investor with a $1 billion equity capital commitment primarily from its third global infrastructure fund to develop and build data centers for large technology companies through GTR across Europe over the coming years. KKR further stated that its investment in GTR may be supplemented with additional commitments over time.

“We are thrilled to have found an investor like KKR that shares our vision for the future of the data center market. KKR’s breadth of resources and tremendous expertise will allow GTR to fully participate in this growing market and provide a solid foundation for GTR’s future growth and success,” said Franek.

Franek is the co-founder and chief development officer of Sentrum, as well as the former founder and CEO of Zenium Data Centers before it was acquired by CyrusOne for $442 million. Franek will now be joined by a number of professionals in the data center industry across Europe as part of the GTR management team, including Martin Carroll, former Lead Director, EMEA Data Center Advisory at JLL; Mark Trevor, former Partner and Head of EMEA Data Center Transaction and Advisory at Cushman & Wakefield and Tom Sodzawiczny, former Associate Director of Capital Markets at Colliers International.