CBRE Buys Onnec for $610M to Wire Data Center Racks

On October 20, 2026, CBRE Group announced a definitive agreement to acquire Onnec Group Limited, and furnished the release to the SEC the same day on a Form 8-K under Item 7.01. The initial purchase price is £460 million in cash, which CBRE puts at approximately $610 million. The parties also agreed to a multi-year earnout of up to £300 million, about $400 million, subject to Onnec meeting growth thresholds the release does not specify. CBRE says it expects Onnec to generate approximately £370 million ($498 million) of revenue and more than £50 million ($67 million) of core EBITDA in 2027, and to be immediately accretive to CBRE’s core earnings per share. The deal is subject to customary regulatory approvals and is expected to close around the end of the year.

Founded in 1986 and based in London, Onnec designs, deploys and maintains network, fiber and data center infrastructure, and CBRE says its approximately 800 employees serve hyperscalers in the United Kingdom, Continental Europe and Asia Pacific. Onnec will operate inside CBRE’s Critical Infrastructure Services line, which CBRE expects to produce nearly $4.5 billion of revenue in 2027 including Onnec. CBRE adds almost $2.5 billion of infrastructure services revenue it expects from its other businesses, mainly Project Management and Advisory Services, for nearly $7.0 billion in total, not counting periodic data center land sales. Onnec posted the same release on its own site. Some coverage called Onnec an equipment provider and others called this a billion-dollar deal; CBRE’s own description is infrastructure services, and the billion counts the full earnout.

The price says what CBRE thinks the work inside the shell is worth. Because CBRE expects more than £50 million of 2027 core EBITDA, the £460 million upfront price computes to no more than about 9.2 times that forecast, and the maximum £760 million with the full earnout to no more than about 15.2 times, by PSV arithmetic. The earnout is up to about 39 percent of the maximum consideration, so a large share of the price is paid only if Onnec keeps growing. Onnec’s expected revenue is about 11 percent of the $4.5 billion line it joins. Core EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure, and CBRE says it did not reconcile the forecast to GAAP. For data center owners and developers, the signal is that cabling, fiber and the maintenance contracts that follow are a business a strategic buyer will pay forward multiples for, which makes them a cost and schedule line worth tracking on their own.

For owners and occupiers who already use CBRE as broker, property manager or project manager, the deal widens the set of roles one firm can hold on a single project. CBRE describes Onnec’s footprint as Europe and Asia Pacific, aligned with the data center infrastructure services CBRE already delivers in the United States, so the overlap is most direct for portfolios with sites abroad. Onnec’s own boilerplate also lists office and fulfilment center connectivity, not only data halls. An owner whose project manager is a CBRE business may, after closing, receive a cabling or fiber bid from a CBRE affiliate. That is not improper in itself, but it should be visible to the owner and approved by the owner.

The tool is an affiliate-role register for each asset or project. Inputs are every services agreement on the asset (brokerage, property management, project management, facilities), the bid list and award for structured cabling, fiber and network work, each vendor’s ownership as stated in its own filings or releases, and the affiliate-disclosure and conflict clauses in the owner’s contracts. The output is one table per project: each firm, its parent, every role it holds, where an affiliate bid or won work, and whether the contract required disclosure or consent. It is refreshed when a deal like this one closes, because a vendor becomes an affiliate at closing, not at announcement.

The reviewer is the asset manager or development lead, with counsel on the contract clauses. The approval gate is that no scope goes to an affiliate of a firm that also manages or advises the project without a documented competitive comparison and written owner approval. Ownership in the register comes from filings and releases, not from a model’s guess, and the register flags; it does not decide.