This article was displayed on the ChosunBiz MoneyMove (MM) website at 5:27 p.m. on Apr. 8, 2026.
With about a year left before the spending deadline for MBK Partners' Special Situations (SS) Fund II, the firm is said to plan to deploy the roughly 1 trillion won remaining in the second fund within this year. The original deadline was this month, but the period was extended by a year thanks to the early recovery of its SK On investment last year. Target assets include infrastructure-type assets such as data centers.
According to the investment banking (IB) industry on the 8th, MBK SS extended Fund II's spending deadline by about a year after completing the recovery of its SK On investment in Aug. last year. The fund was established in 2021 and was sized at $1.8 billion (about 2.6 trillion won).
In 2023, MBK SS invested 457.5 billion won in SK On through Fund II in the form of convertible preferred shares (CPS) and recovered more than 500 billion won by selling them in Aug. last year. SK Group had initially planned to complete an initial public offering (IPO) of SK On by 2026 and guarantee the MBK consortium an annual return of 7.5%, but the sides agreed to an early cash repayment instead.
At the time, Fund II at MBK SS had 500 billion won in undeployed capital remaining, according to the industry. With another 500 billion won flowing in under those circumstances, MBK is said to have asked limited partners (LPs) to extend the spending deadline. An IB industry official said, "From the LPs' perspective, rather than leaving the money that came back sooner than expected idle, they saw a chance to put it to additional investments and generate more returns."
MBK SS is said to be seeking investments with the goal of deploying 1 trillion won within this year. In particular, it is reportedly reviewing a broad range of data centers, an infrastructure-type asset. Data centers can offer stable cash flow based on long-term lease contracts, and with the spread of artificial intelligence (AI), demand for power and telecom infrastructure continues to rise, making them assets viewed as having medium- to long-term growth potential. Because they combine the characteristics of real estate and infrastructure, their performance is relatively less sensitive to economic cycles, and the assets themselves have strong collateral value, making them favored by institutional investors lately.
Data centers also align with MBK SS's strategy. SS mainly handles investments that are more complex than traditional control buyouts, involve urgent funding needs, or wedge into gaps between corporations and assets. Data centers likewise allow diverse structuring—such as development-stage financing, blended equity and mezzanine structures, and partial investments at the asset unit level—making them a good fit for SS capital. And even without a full acquisition, the fund can provide senior- or mezzanine-like financing on a project basis or take minority stakes, offering high utility for a fund that must deploy large sums in a relatively short time.