The AI boom needs data centres. Is the next big winner right here?
Investors are watching Nvidia, AMD, and the hyperscalers, but no AI model runs without physical space, electricity, and cooling. AI-focused data centres increased electricity consumption by 50 percent in 2025, sixteen times faster than overall electricity demand growth. Among the largest owners of this infrastructure in the world is a company that will be discussed in this analysis.
Key points
The company owns 310 data centres, including 89 operated through unconsolidated investment vehicles.
The portfolio covers approximately 300 properties in 57 metropolitan areas across 31 countries, serving around 5,000 customers.
In the second quarter of 2026, Core FFO per share rose 14% year-on-year to $2.13, significantly beating market estimates.
Leverage remains moderate, with net debt to adjusted EBITDA reaching 4.7x at the end of June and a fixed charge coverage ratio of 5.2x.
The quarterly dividend is $1.22 per share, representing an annualized yield of around 2.7 percent.
Data centres today are no longer just warehouses for servers. They are complex energy and cooling systems that take years to build and whose capacity is a scarcer resource than the chips themselves. Gartner estimates that global data centre energy demand will grow by 27 percent to 132 gigawatts in 2026, approaching the total generating capacity of a medium-sized industrialized country. It is at this point that one of the world's largest owners and operators of data centres comes into play.
This company is a real estate investment trust specializing in data centres, colocation, and interconnection services. It does not manufacture chips or operate a cloud; it leases the physical infrastructure in which cloud services, AI models, and enterprise IT systems actually run. The question for an investor is not whether data centre demand will grow. The market has largely answered that question. The key is whether the company can convert this demand growth into higher FFO, a sustainable dividend, and growing shareholder value, and whether it can maintain a competitive position at a time when the largest customers are considering building their own data centres.