NEWARK, New Jersey, May 10, 2026, 15:02 EDT
Goodman Group has bought Anheuser-Busch’s former Newark, New Jersey, brewery in a roughly $360 million deal, giving the Australian industrial property owner a rare large redevelopment site in the New York metro area. Newmark Group said it advised Anheuser-Busch on the sale to Goodman, which it described as a global industrial real estate owner and developer.
The timing matters because Goodman is pushing deeper into logistics and data centers, the high-power buildings that house computer servers, just as investors hunt for land close to airports, ports, consumers and electricity. The Newark site sits beside Newark Liberty International Airport and less than a mile from Port Newark and Port Elizabeth, with direct access to the New Jersey Turnpike and Interstate 78.
The former brewery comprises about 86 acres and more than 1.7 million square feet of existing structures, and its airport-related zoning supports industrial, logistics, airport-related, data center, commercial and hospitality uses. Adam Doneger, Newmark executive vice chairman, said “few sites offer this level of scale, connectivity and zoning flexibility.” Real Estate NJ
Anheuser-Busch has said the sale was part of a broader manufacturing review that also included closing facilities in Fairfield, California, and Merrimack, New Hampshire. The brewer told PEOPLE it had shifted production from the three plants to other U.S. sites and was offering about 475 affected full-time workers roles elsewhere in its U.S. operations.
Public filings cited by CoStar put more of the price on the land than the buildings: about $317.4 million for the land and $43.6 million for the brewery structures. That split says something plain. Goodman is buying a location, not a beer plant.
For Goodman, the Newark purchase fits a larger pivot. In February, the company reported A$1.20 billion in operating profit for the first half and said data centers made up 73% of its A$14.4 billion development work in progress, meaning active projects under development. Chief Executive Greg Goodman said “power, sites and capital” were critical to serving demand and giving customers delivery certainty. ASX Announcements
That shift already had drawn notice before the Newark deal. Reuters reported in December that Goodman and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board struck an A$14 billion partnership to build data centers across Europe; David Tuckwell, chief investment officer at ETF Shares, said Goodman was “not just a landlord” but also developer, operator and equity partner. Reuters
The competitive backdrop is getting tighter. Prologis, one of Goodman’s biggest global logistics real estate peers, says it has converted a Chicago-area warehouse into a 30-megawatt data center and is developing a 600-megawatt Austin power campus, showing how industrial land is being recast for digital infrastructure.
New Jersey’s industrial market gives Goodman a base case even if data-center plans move slowly. Newmark Research said Northern and Central New Jersey entered 2026 with a third straight quarter of positive net absorption, meaning more space was taken up than vacated, while vacancy fell to 6.3%.
But the deal is not free of execution risk. Brewery sites are not plug-and-play data centers, and demolition, environmental work, power upgrades, tenant commitments and local approvals can take time; Goodman itself told investors that construction-ready powered sites take many years to acquire, plan, secure power and deliver.
The next test will be what Goodman signs, not what it owns. If the company lands large logistics or data-center users at Newark, the old brewery becomes another proof point for its land-and-power strategy. If demand, permits or grid access lag, it may look more like a long-dated property bet in a market that already knows how expensive patience can be.
