CBRE agreed Tuesday to buy London-based Onnec Group, a contractor that designs, deploys, and maintains the network and fiber infrastructure inside hyperscale data centres, for £460 million ($610 million) upfront in cash. A multi-year earnout of up to £300 million, roughly $400 million, tied to Onnec hitting specified growth targets could bring the total to approximately $1 billion. The deal is expected to close around the end of the year.
Founded in 1986, Onnec has approximately 800 employees who install equipment inside data centres for hyperscalers across the U.K., Europe, and Asia Pacific. Onnec is expected to generate approximately £370 million ($498 million) in revenue and more than £50 million ($67 million) of core EBITDA in 2027. At the upfront price, CBRE is paying roughly 9x forward EBITDA, a reasonable multiple for a business attached to one of the most capital-intensive build-outs in infrastructure history.
Onnec will operate as part of CBRE’s Critical Infrastructure Services business line, which is expected to generate nearly $4.5 billion of total revenue in 2027 including new contributions from the acquisition. CBRE reported about $700 million in revenue from data center services in the second quarter of 2026. Onnec expands that footprint geographically at a moment when European and Asia Pacific hyperscaler spending is accelerating.
The strategic logic is clear enough. The purchase pushes the biggest firm in commercial real estate services further into the equipment side of data centres. CBRE’s COO Vikram Kohli framed it as “an explicit strategy to build a global infrastructure services business to complement our real estate services business,” adding that Onnec has long been seen as an excellent fit.
For traders, the more relevant question is whether any of this matters to CBRE’s share price. Probably not much in the near term. At roughly $1 billion all-in, this is a bolt-on for a company that already guides toward $4.5 billion in critical infrastructure revenue next year. There is no transformative re-rating argument here.
The angle worth watching is competitive pressure on JLL. JLL has framed the data centre industry as entering the early stages of what it describes as a $3 trillion investment supercycle. JLL anticipates AI workloads will represent half of all data center workloads by 2030. CBRE now has deeper boots on the ground in Europe and Asia Pacific, two regions where JLL has been loudest about opportunity. Every contract Onnec wins for a hyperscaler in Frankfurt or Singapore is one JLL’s data centre services division does not.
Traders in real estate services names should note what this deal is not: a sign of distress, a dilutive equity raise, or a departure from CBRE’s stated priorities. It is disciplined execution of a strategy already priced into the stock to some degree. The earnout structure, contingent on Onnec meeting growth targets, limits downside if hyperscaler capex cools.
Watch: CBRE’s Critical Infrastructure Services revenue in Q4 guidance, any JLL response on the data centre services front, and whether the earnout triggers become a read-through on European hyperscaler build velocity.
