Digital Realty
More info
- Released
- 2004
- Type
- Data centre company (REIT)
- Website
- digitalrealty.com
A property company that happens to own a large share of the world's data centres and rents out floor space, power and cooling to whoever owns the computers.
It went public in 2004 as a REIT, the US real estate trust structure that pays out nearly all its profit and very little tax. The business is deliberately dull: Digital Realty doesn't own the servers, only the building around them, with backup power, cooling and fibre coming in. Its tenants are cloud providers, banks and carriers that would rather not build their own.
Growth has largely been bought. Telx in 2015 brought colocation sites in US cities, DuPont Fabros in 2017 brought big halls for hyperscalers, and Interxion in 2020 brought a European footprint that included facilities in Stockholm. That made it the main rival to Equinix, with a different emphasis: where Equinix sells proximity to other networks, Digital Realty mostly sells megawatts.