A Brookfield-backed data center operator is asking public markets to value it at more than $4 billion, and the filing lands at a moment when data centers have quietly become one of the more contested asset classes in commercial real estate.
Csquare Inc., a Dallas-based colocation and interconnection operator founded in 2019, filed to raise up to $1.35 billion in a US IPO. The offering is structured as 50 million shares priced between $23 and $27 each, which would value the company at roughly $4.18 billion at the top of that range. Brookfield Corp. will keep voting control after the listing. Morgan Stanley, TD, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, BMO, and Bank of Nova Scotia are running the deal, and shares are expected to list on the NYSE under the ticker CSQR.
The company is carrying $734 million drawn on a revolving credit facility, a $75 million promissory note owed to its own parent, Brookfield, and $4.3 billion in asset-backed notes. IPO proceeds are earmarked to pay down the revolver and the Brookfield note and chip away at the rest. That’s a highly leveraged structure sitting underneath 60-plus data center sites across the US, Canada, and the UK, most of it running on 1-to-7-year colocation and interconnection contracts.
The Q1 numbers show the strain. Revenue grew to $270.5 million from $232.8 million a year earlier. The net loss grew too, to $66 million from $34.9 million. Growth and widening losses in the same quarter is the pattern to watch across this sector right now, not just at Csquare.
Csquare is timing the raise against a strong comp set. Applied Digital is up 35% year to date. Equinix is up 31%. Digital Realty Trust, the closest thing to a pure-play data center REIT most CRE investors already track, is up 12%. Public market appetite for anything adjacent to AI infrastructure is real, and Csquare’s bankers are clearly leaning on that momentum to get the valuation across the line.
What the filing doesn’t spell out is who’s actually in those buildings. There’s no disclosed tenant concentration, no named hyperscaler commitments, and no detail on renewal terms as those 1-to-7-year contracts start rolling over against a base of leverage this size.
Power availability and interconnection capacity have become the actual scarcity constraint in this sector, more than physical shell space. Csquare’s S-1 leans on site count and geographic footprint. It says less about power contracts, grid interconnection queues, or the utility relationships that increasingly decide which data center portfolios can actually grow versus which ones are sitting on entitled land waiting for power.
The float prices sometime in the next several weeks. Whether CSQR trades toward the Equinix comp or toward its own widening loss column is the first real signal for how public markets are pricing leverage against AI-demand hype in this asset class, and it’s a signal every CRE investor with data center exposure should be watching regardless of whether they touch this specific stock.
