Csquare, a data center operator backed by Brookfield Corporation, is set to begin trading on the NYSE under the ticker CSQR. The offering covers 50 million shares priced between $23 and $27, with the company looking to raise up to $1.35 billion.

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That makes it one of the bigger AI-adjacent listings in a summer full of them. But Csquare isn't selling compute. It's selling the buildings the compute sits in.

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The landlord model

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Csquare runs a colocation business. That is, customers bring their own servers and networking gear, and Csquare rents them the secure space, power, cooling, and the connections that tie it all together.

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The footprint is substantial: 64 data centers across 21 metropolitan markets in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., delivering roughly 389 megawatts of power capacity to more than 1,700 customers.

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Compare that to CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) and Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS). Those companies own the servers and the expensive GPUs inside their facilities, and they make money selling AI computing power. Csquare makes money on rent. And that rent is contracted, with an average remaining term of about 33 months and some deals stretching as long as seven years.

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Worth noting: Brookfield assembled this platform through acquisitions, buying Evoque Data Center Solutions from AT&T in 2019 for about $1.1 billion and then the bankrupt Cyxtera Technologies in 2024 for $775 million. That history tells you this IPO is as much about Brookfield monetizing a finished product as it is about funding growth. Brookfield keeps voting control after the offering, so public shareholders will have limited say in how the company is run.

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The numbers behind the offering

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The business is growing, though not explosively. Full-year revenue rose from $907.6 million in 2024 to $987 million in 2025, an increase of about 9%. The first quarter of this year looked better:

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* Q1 revenue of $270.5 million, up 16% from $232.8 million a year earlier
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* Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $108.3 million, up from $86.3 million
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* New bookings of $64.2 million in the quarter
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* Roughly 670 megawatts of expansion capacity already embedded in existing facilities
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Csquare still lost $66 million in the first quarter, wider than the $34.9 million loss a year ago, and posted a $119.9 million net loss for full-year 2025. Heavy depreciation and interest costs come with the territory when you build data centers with borrowed money.

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And that debt is the other thing to understand about this deal. The IPO proceeds are earmarked mostly for paying down borrowings, which makes this offering partly a debt-reduction event rather than a pure growth raise.

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To be sure, the risks here don't look like the risks at a neocloud. That's the industry's label for companies like CoreWeave and Nebius that own the GPUs and sell the AI computing power itself. You're not betting on GPU prices or billion-dollar AI contracts. But you are buying a leveraged real estate business, and part of this portfolio is the former Cyxtera, a company that went public through a SPAC in 2021 and was bankrupt by 2023. Different owner now, better market, same buildings.

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Make no mistake: the demand backdrop is real. AI workloads need power-dense space, and Csquare's facilities can host the higher-density deployments used for AI inference. That's the process of running trained models, and it's where much of the industry's growth is expected to land.

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If you want exposure to AI infrastructure without the capital-intensive arms race for next-generation chips, this is the steadier lane. Just know whose building you're renting a piece of. Brookfield owns the keys, and it isn't handing them over.

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