The acquisition expands CBRE's business of delivering the guts of data centers, reflecting real estate's growing reliance on the tech cycle
By Peter Grant
Real-estate giant CBRE is acquiring a company that equips data centers in a $1 billion deal, the latest sign that commercial real estate is tying its growth to the AI spending boom.
CBRE has agreed to pay about $610 million in cash for London-based Onnec Group, plus up to $400 million tied to growth targets over several years. Onnec's 800 employees install and maintain cabling and equipment racks inside data centers for major technology companies in Europe and Asia Pacific.
That acquisition, along with CBRE's 2024 purchase of U.S.-based Direct Line, takes it deeper into new territory: the technology found inside data centers. Up until recently, CBRE's data-center work has focused on its traditional roles such as construction services, management, financing, and sales and lease brokerage.
Now, the world's largest commercial real-estate services firm is expanding from bricks-and-mortar services to installing the cabling and connections that enable servers to power artificial intelligence. The recent purchases take CBRE into "where the actual compute happens," CBRE Chief Executive Bob Sulentic said.
Commercial real-estate services firms are increasingly looking to the technology sector to fuel growth. Data-center capacity in eight major U.S. markets grew nearly 34% in the year that ended June 30, according to CBRE. Even with that expansion, only 1.4% of capacity was vacant.
The sector offers a new opportunity for the real-estate business as rising interest rates have tempered prospects for office, retail and multifamily developments.
Yet the push into the lucrative data-center business isn't without cost. Commercial real estate historically has offered investors a way to diversify their portfolios away from the risk of a tech bubble bursting.
Now, these firms are becoming much more closely aligned to the tech cycle. A pullback in spending on data-center construction, equipment and networks would undermine an increasingly important source of growth.
Some investors fear the spending boom could prove to be a bubble, questioning whether revenue from AI services will grow fast enough to justify the enormous investment in infrastructure.
Sulentic said the AI and data-center industry is "extremely frothy." But he argues that CBRE has opportunities beyond new construction, including upgrading and managing existing facilities.
For now, the AI boom offers real-estate services firms opportunities to earn fees at nearly every stage of a data center's life, from finding land and overseeing construction to connecting equipment, managing the facility and financing or brokering its sale.
"They're touching a lot of pieces of this," said Anthony Paolone, a real-estate analyst at JPMorgan Chase.
At CBRE, data centers and other infrastructure work generated roughly $450 million in earnings in 2025, accounting for 14% of the company's total, up from 3% in 2021. Sulentic said CBRE expects about $7 billion in infrastructure revenue in 2027, including work on data centers, energy and transportation projects.
JLL, the second-largest commercial real-estate services firm, is also expanding its data-center business, hiring specialists and adding capabilities in energy and engineering. The firm operates more than 400 facilities globally, and its data-center markets team has roughly doubled in the past two years, said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of JLL's U.S. Data Center Markets team.
"We're hiring faster than we can even keep up with," Cvengros said.
Still, investors worry that the AI boom threatens some established revenue streams. Businesses that use AI to operate with fewer employees may need less office space, reducing opportunities to earn fees from leasing, selling, financing and managing those buildings.
AI could also automate research, valuations and parts of dealmaking, allowing clients to pay less for advice or bypass brokers altogether. Those fears helped send shares of CBRE, JLL and other commercial real-estate services firms tumbling in February.
Paolone considers fears of AI replacing brokers overblown, pointing to the complexity of negotiations, financing and due diligence. "There's going to need to be quite a bit of human involvement and judgment in these things," he said.