Data Centers
Data Center REITs & Colocation
The Public Landlords
Four listed owners, three different businesses: interconnection-rich retail colo (Equinix), wholesale build-to-suit (Digital Realty), a records REIT funding a data center pipeline (Iron Mountain), and China exposure (GDS).
| Company | Model | 2025 revenue |
|---|---|---|
| Equinix (EQIX) | Retail colocation and interconnection: many tenants per site, 522,700 total interconnections and 449,100 physical cross-connects as of Q2 2026, premium pricing on ecosystem density. xScale JVs carry the hyperscale build-to-suit business off balance sheet. | $9.2B |
| Digital Realty (DLR) | Wholesale and build-to-suit landlord for hyperscalers plus a colocation business. Multi-gigawatt development pipeline concentrated in Northern Virginia, Dallas, and Frankfurt; large deals increasingly done in joint ventures. | $6.2B |
| Iron Mountain (IRM) | Records management REIT funding a fast-growing data center platform; more than a gigawatt leased or under development, sold largely to hyperscalers. Data centers are the growth story inside a mature cash-flow business. | $6.9B (all segments) |
| GDS Holdings (GDS) | China's leading carrier-neutral developer-operator, concentrated in tier-1 metros, with the international DayOne platform carved out for Southeast Asia AI demand. Carries China regulatory and utilization risk the US names do not. | $1.6B |
Equinix vs Digital Realty: Quarterly Revenue
A decade of the two public giants. Equinix compounds with unusual consistency on interconnection pricing power; Digital Realty steps with acquisitions and lumpy wholesale leasing. Revenue lags the AI cycle because signed leases commission over years.
Landlord Capital Spending
The landlords' own buildout. Development spending has roughly tripled since 2019, and it understates the real pipeline because the largest hyperscale deals moved into off-balance-sheet joint ventures.
Major Markets and Their Constraints
Where the capacity is, and what stops it growing. Every major market has hit a different wall: power delivery in Virginia, government caps in Singapore, grid moratoria in Dublin. The constraints are the pricing power.
| Market | Binding constraint |
|---|---|
| Northern Virginia | Vacancy under 1 percent; transmission constraints, multi-year power delivery timelines, and growing local opposition documented in the state's JLARC review |
| Dallas-Fort Worth | Grid interconnection queues and ERCOT large-load rules; water and transmission build-out pace |
| Phoenix | Water scrutiny in a drought region; transmission capacity |
| Atlanta | Utility large-load queue forming; local zoning pushback emerging |
| Central Ohio (Columbus) | The AEP large-load tariff settlement became the national template for making data centers underwrite grid upgrades |
| Singapore | Government capacity cap with green-data-center allocation scheme; new capacity rationed for efficiency |
| Dublin | Grid operator pause on new data center connections in the Dublin region; data centers are a double-digit share of Irish electricity |
| Frankfurt / FLAP-D | Land scarcity, power costs, and EU energy-efficiency reporting; Amsterdam has periodically restricted new builds |
Miner-to-AI Conversions
Bitcoin miners hold the sector's scarcest asset: energized sites with large grid connections. The conversion trade turned them into AI landlords almost overnight, with hyperscalers backstopping the leases.
| Company | Deal |
|---|---|
| Applied Digital (APLD) | CoreWeave leases of roughly 400 MW with total contract value around $11B over 15 years |
| Core Scientific (CORZ) | Roughly 590 MW contracted under 12-year deals worth $10B+; shareholders rejected CoreWeave's all-stock acquisition in late 2025 |
| IREN (IREN) | Microsoft GPU cloud contract of roughly $9.7B over five years announced November 2025, on top of self-built AI capacity |
| TeraWulf (WULF) | Multi-hundred-megawatt Fluidstack leases backstopped by Google, which took an equity stake alongside |
| Cipher Mining (CIFR) | Fluidstack lease with Google backstop (2025) followed by an AWS deal of roughly $5.5B announced December 2025 |
Equinix Total Interconnections
The retail-colo density metric: physical cross-connects plus virtual connections. The book grew from 492,300 in Q2 2025 to 522,700 in Q2 2026, including a record 9,700 net adds in the latest quarter, while cabinet utilization held around 76 to 78 percent.
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