Oaktree-backed firm unveils $1.2 billion Amsterdam data centre project

By Lucy ‌Raitano

LONDON, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Oaktree Capital-backed firm Pure Data Centres said on Monday it plans ‍to spend ‌up to 1 billion euros ($1.17 billion) on an Amsterdam campus, in one of the biggest "hyperscale" data ⁠centre investments announced in Europe this year.

Pure ‌Data Centres said the campus will be leased by a single 'hyperscaler' tenant, which are large-scale cloud service providers. These companies are racing to build AI infrastructure. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft are projected to spend hundreds ⁠of billions of dollars in 2025, according to company filings.

A raft of planned data centres projects have been announced in ​Europe this year, but it is less common for a ‌project to have a lease already agreed. 

Construction ⁠of the Amsterdam campus will begin in January 2026, and there will be a phased delivery of the campus which is anticipated from 2028 onwards, Pure Data Centres said. 

The new ​data centre will be able to serve either AI or cloud workloads, Pure DC said.

A private substation will power the data centre. Grid constraints are one of the main challenges facing the data centre industry in Europe.

The data centre campus will be the largest by power ​capacity in ‍Amsterdam, according to Stijn Grove, ​who heads the Dutch Data Center Association.

New capacity of 78MW is sizeable in a European context, equating to around 7% of the total 1162MW of new live data centre capacity added year-to-date in continental Europe, based on research from real estate services firm Savills using DC Byte data.

Power capacity, measured in megawatts, is the key metric used for sizing data centres. It refers to ⁠the total possible power a data centre can deliver to servers, cooling systems, and other infrastructure.

Pure DC is backed by U.S.-based asset manager ​Oaktree Capital Management, a distressed debt specialist founded in 1995, which had $218 billion in assets under management as of September 30 2025, according to its website.

Oaktree is owned by New York-based Brookfield Asset Management, which is owned by Brookfield.

In March, Pure DC ‌partnered with London-listed REIT Segro, to build a 56MW data centre in West London.

($1 = 0.8516 euros)

(Reporting by Lucy Raitano in London; additional reporting by Toby Sterling in Amsterdam; Editing by Amanda Cooper)