DigitalBridge claims to have a 12GW data center capacity pipeline that can be live within the next three years.
During the company’s Q4 2024 earnings results this month, DigitalBridge CEO Marc Ganzi outlined the digital infrastructure investor’s targets for 2025 and beyond.
The company secured a record $9 billion in fundraising in 2024 – including $4.8 billion in the fourth quarter. The company had a $7 billion annual target. Across its portfolio, DigitalBridge saw close to $16 billion in capex. The company has some $96 billion of assets under management.
Across its portfolio, DigitalBridge had close to 4GW of leased capacity at the end of 2024. Across seven data center platforms, DigitalBridge’s portfolio totals more than 200 facilities globally.
The company has a development pipeline totaling up to 16GW, with Ganzi saying up to 12GW available within the next three years.
Looking ahead to 2025, Ganzi said that DigitalBridge expects to make “complementary and strategic” M&A moves – though details on what areas the company might target weren’t shared.
Across all its funds, DigitalBridge aims to deploy more than $18 billion.
DigitalBridge targets power and stabilized assets
This year will see DigitalBridge focus on final capital formation for its third flagship DigitalBridge Partner strategy, as well as its second credit fund. Ganzi added the company is aiming to launch a second private wealth offering and “strategies built around digital energy and stabilized data center assets.”
“We think these new product offerings are not only natural but strategic and really offer the potential to scale in size over time,” he said. The new power and stabilized asset funds will reportedly come online around Q3 of this year.
He also outlined the investment opportunity on power: “For every $1 trillion you spend on data centers, you're going to spend $500 billion on power. Power is a massive opportunity, and no one has gotten it right. Nobody understands the issues, no one understands the bottlenecks, [but] we do. And we're building that power infrastructure adjacent to our global leading data center portfolio.”
The company’s upcoming energy product will be focused on building out power and dealing with the bottlenecks that exist in Europe and the US around transmission and distribution – with a “sharp focus” on battery, storage, micro-grids, and renewable power.
DigitalBridge reportedly has a backlog of about a dozen projects the company is working on today and is working with an operating partner. Ganzi noted the new investment vehicle won’t necessarily need to invest in power tied to a DigitalBridge data center.
“We're actually working with some of our competitors in terms of bringing power,” he said.
On the stabilized data center front, Ganzi said the company is working to create a real estate fund to go out and buy stabilized and investment-grade data centers. The new fund will target the “$90 billion of stranded capital that exists in these big hyperscale campuses.”
A lot of “tourists” in the data center space
Ganzi mentioned that despite Deepseek, the velocity of customer capex “is not slowing down, it's actually increasing,” especially as companies move from training to inference.
“Serving cloud and growing generative AI workloads is generating very good incremental margins for these companies,” he said. “So, they're motivated to build the capacity to meet demand and avoid hitting bottlenecks in their business cases. We're just at the beginning of really building out the generative AI delivery mechanism for infrastructure.”
Ganzi did note, however, that there were “a lot of tourists playing in data center land” right now: “Just because they have land and power, they believe they're in the data center business.”
On small cells, Ganzi said he predicts the total number of nodes in the US to double from around 1 million today to 2 million by 2029, driven by ‘post-5G and genAI’.
