On the desk today · Digital Realty
Your cloud has a landlord. Your AI has a landlord. Digital Realty is that landlord.
| NYSE · DLR |
$200 Trillion AI "Treasure Map"
A Pentagon AI system just uncovered 184,000 hidden gold sites across America. It also found hidden copper, silver, and a whole host of other resources. The end result? An AI "treasure map" that could be worth as much as $200 TRILLION. See how you can claim your stake of this treasure here.
The Building Your
Data Sleeps In
In the spring of 2004, the dot-com bust was still fresh. Hundreds of technology companies had failed. Office parks sat empty. And scattered across Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, Chicago, and Dallas stood a peculiar kind of real estate that nobody wanted — windowless buildings filled with cooling systems, backup generators, and miles of fiber-optic cable. Data centers. Built during the boom. Abandoned during the crash.
A private equity firm called GI Partners looked at those empty buildings and saw something the market had missed. The tech companies were gone. But the buildings were still there — purpose-built, power-dense, connected to every major network. GI Partners bought them at distressed prices, packaged them into a portfolio, and on November 4, 2004, took it public as Digital Realty Trust. The pitch was simple: the companies that use data centers will change. The need for data centers will not.
I backed up my phone to the cloud last night. I didn't think about where the data went. But it went somewhere physical — a building, in a specific city, on a specific plot of land. The photos I uploaded now sit on a server inside a climate-controlled room where the temperature never varies, the power never cuts, and the network connection runs 24 hours a day. That room is almost certainly inside a facility owned or operated by a company most people have never thought about.
Digital Realty is the largest global provider of carrier-neutral and cloud-neutral data center solutions. It owns and operates more than 300 facilities across more than 50 metropolitan areas in over 25 countries on six continents. "Carrier-neutral" means any telecommunications company can connect inside the building. "Cloud-neutral" means Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all coexist under the same roof. The tenants include Meta, Oracle, Verizon, and hundreds of the world's largest enterprise and cloud customers.
The company has grown through two transformative acquisitions — DuPont Fabros Technology for $7.8 billion in 2017, which doubled its hyperscale capacity, and Interxion for $8.4 billion in 2020, which gave it a dominant position in European data centers. Today, the portfolio spans from Ashburn, Virginia — the world's densest data center corridor — to Frankfurt, London, Singapore, São Paulo, and Lagos.
In fiscal 2025, Digital Realty reported $6.11 billion in revenue — up 10% from the year before. Core FFO per share reached $7.39, up 10.1%. The company signed $1.2 billion in new leasing during the year, measured in annualized rent. And it ended the year with a backlog of $817 million in annualized GAAP base rent — contracts already signed for facilities not yet delivering revenue. The pipeline is filling before the buildings are built.
|
Where should you invest $100 right now?
Elon Musk just invented and patented this new AI technology…
And he's predicting it will launch a NEW industry that will grow more than 7 million percent in the coming years.
Even if he's only 10% right, that would still be enough to grow $100 into more than $700,000.
That $817 million backlog is the number that separates Digital Realty from a traditional landlord. A data center lease is signed months — sometimes years — before the facility is built and the tenant moves in. Digital Realty commits the land and the power. The tenant commits the rent. By the time the servers are installed, the revenue has already been locked. The backlog is future income that has already been contracted but doesn't yet appear in any earnings report.
The stickiness is physical. A hyperscale tenant like Meta or Oracle installs millions of dollars of servers, networking equipment, and storage systems inside a Digital Realty facility. The equipment is connected to every major carrier and cloud provider in the building through cross-connects — direct fiber links that enable the data to move at the speed the applications demand. Moving that equipment to another building means disconnecting every cross-connect, physically relocating the hardware, reestablishing every network link, and accepting days or weeks of reduced performance. Nobody does it. The lease renews. In fiscal 2025, renewal lease rates rose 6% to 8% on a cash basis — meaning tenants paid more for the same space every time they renewed.
Andy Power — Digital Realty's president and CEO — said it plainly in the fourth-quarter 2025 earnings release: "Digital Realty delivered strong financial results in 2025, with robust top-line growth, record leasing across our 0-1 megawatt plus interconnection offering, and a substantial backlog that provides clear revenue visibility into 2026 and beyond."
The flywheel runs on the world's insatiable demand for computing power. Every AI model trained, every cloud application deployed, every video streamed, every autonomous vehicle tested needs data center capacity. Global data creation roughly doubles every two years. The supply of data center space — constrained by power availability, land, permitting, and construction timelines — cannot keep up. Digital Realty sits at the intersection of unlimited demand and limited supply. It controls power-dense sites in the most connected markets on earth. And it is building as fast as the grid will allow — with a multi-gigawatt development pipeline that stretches years into the future.
WHY THIS WORKS
The servers can't move. Once a tenant installs millions in equipment and connects to dozens of carriers inside the building, relocating is operationally unthinkable. Leases renew at higher rates because the alternative doesn't exist.
Demand grows faster than supply. AI, cloud migration, and data localization laws are driving exponential growth in compute demand. Power-dense data center space is the bottleneck — and Digital Realty controls the supply.
$817 million in backlog is future revenue already sold. Leases are signed years before facilities deliver. The revenue pipeline provides visibility that most real estate companies don't have.
Carrier-neutral and cloud-neutral positioning. Every major carrier and cloud provider connects inside Digital Realty's buildings. The more tenants, the more interconnections. The more interconnections, the harder it is for anyone to leave. Data gravity holds the customer in place.
In 2004, GI Partners bought empty data centers that the dot-com bust had left behind. The technology companies that built them had failed. But the buildings — the power, the cooling, the fiber — were still there. Twenty-two years later, those buildings and hundreds more like them house the infrastructure that runs the global economy. Your email, your streaming, your cloud storage, your AI assistant — all of it passes through a physical building in a specific place. Digital Realty owns more of those buildings than anyone else on earth. The companies that rent from it include the most valuable in the world. And the lease, once signed, almost never ends. The data moves at the speed of light. The building doesn't move at all.
