Digital Realty Trust, Inc.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. is one of the world's largest owners, developers, and operators of carrier-neutral data centers, providing colocation, hyperscale capacity, and interconnection services across more than 300 facilities in over 55 metropolitan areas on six continents. The company generated $6.1 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025 and carries an enterprise value of roughly $85 billion, making it the second-largest publicly traded data center landlord by market capitalization after Equinix.

The Digital Realty story in 2026 is a story about scale being rewarded. After three years of methodical balance-sheet repair and a strategic pivot toward private capital, the company has arrived at a moment where AI-driven demand for digital infrastructure is colliding with severe constraints on new supply — power availability, community opposition, equipment lead times — and the gap between what customers want and what the industry can deliver is widening. Digital Realty's response has been a development pipeline that swelled to $16.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, a backlog of signed-but-not-commenced leases that reached $1.8 billion, and leverage that fell to a multiyear low of 4.7x net debt to EBITDA even as investment spending accelerated.

This is an infrastructure compounder dressed in a REIT wrapper, and the file turns on a single question: whether the returns on the enormous capital being deployed into hyperscale development will justify the complexity of the funding model over a full cycle, or whether the industry's current pricing power is a cyclical gift that will be competed away as supply eventually catches up.