The AI Data Center Gold Rush Is Leaving The Landlords Behind |
Swollen with seemingly insatiable demand for computing power, the AI boom has birthed hundreds of unicorns out of thin air, minted dozens of billionaires and alchemized more than a trillion dollars in market value for big public tech companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, Google and Meta. It’s also inspired an infrastructure land grab perhaps unprecedented in financial breadth. Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to build out tens of gigawatts of AI infrastructure this decade, and “hundreds of gigawatts or more over time.” At $50 billion per gigawatt, that’ll likely cost trillions.
Boom times for AI infrastructure should mean banner years for the companies that have historically provided it: data center real estate investment trusts, or REITs. Yet three of the biggest, Equinix ($78 billion market cap), Digital Realty ($55 billion market cap) and Iron Mountain ($27 billion market cap), aren’t seeing them. Their share prices are down 13%, 11% and 16% over the last year, respectively, compared to the S&P 500’s 17% increase.
These companies are the landlords for the internet; they buy real estate, build data center shells with supporting infrastructure, and lease the property to tech company tenants. They should be killing it. They’re not, and it's likely because of a few things: lower appetite for risk, power constraints and lack of access to more—and more speculative capital.
Right now, the market believes that chips from Google, Broadcom, Nvidia and others “will capture the economic profits of AI, not mercenary data center developers [like] REITs,” says Mark Giarelli, analyst for Morningstar. It doesn’t help that the top 20 data center development contracts signed in 2025 were won by companies other than data center REITs like Equinix and Digital Realty, says Michael Funk, an analyst at Bank of America.
Part of the challenge lies in the REIT structure itself. It was originally designed back in the 1960s to let ordinary people in on real estate investing by not charging corporate income tax, and requiring that any REIT company pay out 90% of its........