Andy Power, president and CEO of Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR), sat down for a video interview at Nareit’s REITweek: 2026 Investor Conference in New York, June 1-4.
Power said accelerating demand from AI, cloud computing, and broader digital transformation is creating significant growth opportunities across the REIT’s global platform. Digital Realty supports nearly 6,000 customers, including enterprises adding new technology workloads and hyperscale customers expanding cloud and AI inference deployments across the United States, Europe, Tokyo, and South America.
Power said Digital Realty’s scale and long-term planning position it well amid growing power constraints. The company operates 3 gigawatts of data centers across 300 facilities in 55 metro areas and has a 6-gigawatt development runway, including 1.2 gigawatts currently under construction representing a 40% expansion of its current base of operational data centers.
He pointed to a recent 200-megawatt AI inference lease in Charlotte, North Carolina—the largest lease in the REIT’s history— as an example of the company’s ability to align customer demand, utility partnerships, and community needs.
Digital Realty remains focused on both enterprise and hyperscale customers, with Power describing a “virtuous cycle” in which enterprises colocate private cloud workloads with Digital Realty while connecting to cloud and AI partners. The strongest markets, he said, are those with “not just robust demand, but diversity of demand,” as well as locational and latency-sensitive workloads that reinforce durability.
Looking ahead, Power said investors may be underestimating the scale and longevity of digital infrastructure growth. “We are in the largest infrastructure build-out in the history of mankind,” he said, adding that data centers are becoming permanent infrastructure comparable to “the highways, the airports, the seaports” that support the flow of technology and data for decades to come.