Glossary

Data Center REIT

A publicly traded real estate investment trust specializing in the ownership and operation of data center properties, spanning wholesale, colocation, and hybrid business models, and increasingly one of the largest REIT sub-sectors by market capitalization.

The data center REIT sector has grown from a niche category into one of the largest sub-sectors in the public REIT universe, driven by cloud computing adoption and, more recently, AI infrastructure buildout, and its consolidation history mirrors the sector's own vertical integration — large-scale mergers and acquisitions between wholesale and colocation platforms have created hybrid REITs able to serve tenants across the full spectrum from single-cabinet retail colocation to gigawatt-scale hyperscale campuses. Data center REITs disclose sector-specific metrics not standard in other REIT categories, including megawatts of leased and available critical load, backlog of signed-but-not-commenced leases (often substantial given multi-year construction timelines for hyperscale commitments), and same-capital revenue growth measured in dollars per kilowatt, all of which analysts use in place of, or alongside, traditional same-store NOI metrics.