ENERGY & INFRASTRUCTURE
CVC DIF Acquires Majority Stake in Frankfurt Data Centre Operator firstcolo
The deal will fund a greenfield, AI-ready facility near Frankfurt offering up to 24 MW of capacity, with the founding management team remaining in place.
CVC DIF, the infrastructure business of global private markets manager CVC, has agreed to acquire a significant majority stake in firstcolo GmbH, an established data centre and digital infrastructure operator in the Frankfurt metropolitan region. The investment will be made through CVC DIF Value Add IV, with CUBE Infrastructure as the seller. Completion is expected by the end of September 2026, subject to customary closing conditions. Founded in 2007, firstcolo operates two data centres in the region, serving more than 350 customers with colocation, dedicated hardware, cloud, connectivity and managed services.
A new AI-ready facility near Frankfurt
The partnership with CVC DIF will fund firstcolo's next phase of growth, with an initial focus on the FRA7 greenfield project in Rosbach vor der Höhe, within the Frankfurt metropolitan region. The facility will provide up to 24 MW of total capacity, equivalent to up to 16 MW of IT load, designed from the outset to support artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and cloud workloads, with liquid-cooled racks supporting up to 200 kW each. firstcolo is targeting a power usage effectiveness of below 1.2 at the site and has entered a partnership with regional energy provider OVAG to secure the site's energy supply and enable use of data centre waste heat in regional district heating networks.
Management team continuing in place
Jerome Evans and Nicolaj Kamensek, firstcolo's co-founders, will remain active managers and shareholders in their roles as Chief Executive and Chief Operating Officer respectively, alongside Chief Financial Officer Dennis Bergfeld. Evans said: "The partnership with CVC DIF marks an important milestone for firstcolo — and a significant endorsement of what our team has built over recent years... Our objective is to develop firstcolo into one of Germany's leading colocation providers."
A local-for-local approach to sourcing
Willem Jansonius, Managing Partner at CVC DIF and Head of the CVC DIF Value Add strategy, said firstcolo "represents a rare opportunity to invest in a high-quality, founder-led colocation platform in an attractive and supply-constrained FLAP-D data centre markets," combining "a resilient, cash-generative existing business with a substantially de-risked expansion project." Stefan Moosmann, Head of DACH at CVC DIF, said the deal was "a strong example of CVC DIF's local-for-local approach in action," sourced through the firm's Frankfurt team and developed with its pan-European digital infrastructure team. CVC DIF has c. EUR 23 billion of infrastructure assets under management and forms the infrastructure strategy of CVC.