Keynote Speaker: Andrew Power | RECM 2026

Thank you all for having us here today. And welcome. I'm excited to have with me Andy Power, president and CEO of Digital Realty, world's largest cloud and carrier neutral data center platform. Plan to talk today about a few different topics around Andy and his leadership journey, the company, Digital Realty, customers, competition, some finance and strategic M&A, and really excited about the discussion. So why don't we start and get into it. Thank you. Let's start with your leadership journey here. So describe your career, give everyone a bit of background around your career and how you got to where you are today.

Sure. So thanks for taking some time and Andrew, thank you for moderating this and thanks to letting me be a part of the real estate capital markets conference hosted by Columbia and Goodwin. So my career really started, I'll take you all back to, I graduated in 2002 which meant I was interviewing for my first permanent job in the fall of 2001, which is obviously a bit of a tumultuous time in the world, the economy, not too dissimilar to some of the things we're living through as we speak. I didn't have the traditional internship routes as many, I think the two summers prior I was working at a liquor store and a bouncer at a bar on the Jersey Shore for my pre-permanent job experience. I went in to apply and I didn't get my first choices of going the investment banking route. I'm not sure if you entered the same way in the front door. I was basically snuck in through a cracked window in a mid-year hiring class. I avoided a job going to join Circuit City Finance, which this audience, I'm sure, remembers Circuit City. Talk about technology changing fast at the forefront and then disappearing overnight. Spent a couple years on the lending side, then eventually snuck into investment banking in a January mid-year class in 2004. And then spent the next from 2004 until 2015 working my way up the investment banking ladder from analyst to ultimately managing director. And then left Manhattan, dragged my wife out to the west coast and joined Digital Realty as the CFO, became president I think seven or so years later and then CEO about three years ago. And along that way in my first year in my second job out of school, I was staffed as the first year analyst on the IPO for this rollup IPO at the intersection of real estate and technology. I camped out in offices on Sand Hill Road. In the back of the telecom crash, a firm backed by Kleiner had basically put together this portfolio of not all data centers but data centers and technology manufacturing and we barely got it public at the end of 2004. I think $3 below the pricing range. I spent many days at the printer with the likes of Eteruchi who I've known now for over 20 years, a great partner at Goodwin. And that company ultimately became Digital Realty, where we started and where we are today now supporting nearly 6,000 customers in 55 different metropolitan areas and with data center connectivity infrastructure for digital transformation, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence in its earliest days. I never would have dreamed that and just like I was lucky to not take that Circuit City Finance opportunity I had in front of me, luck has served me well to have had the opportunity and then join the company and be a part of for the last decade.

Interesting. So how did those early experiences in banking and you know working with Digital Realty sort of impact and influence your leadership style today?

So, you know, I'd love to tell you it was some great grand plan that I had some vision of being a CEO, a CFO, or even being part of anything like this. But it honestly for me it was going back to I didn't get my first bite at the apple and my first ambitions out of school. So, I wanted to make sure I was ready for what was next and do whatever I could. So, threw myself at it. As many folks in this room in the legal profession, the banking profession, the private capital profession, there's a lot of sacrifice, hard work that is required, especially in those earliest days and kind of throwing yourself at something like that in an environment which I think all those professions are very meritocracy driven. You basically get to operate at whatever level you're performing. So, that was certainly something influenced me. Now moving inside a company and managing people, I'm not sure they were the best cultural environments for how to mentor, manage, and develop talent. But I think I maybe learned some things inadvertently along the way. At the same time whether it was taking personal risk on developing people, letting your reputation stand and letting people sometimes fail and pick themselves up which is very tough as you move from a doer to a player to a manager to a leader, and trying to make sure you just learn it every step of the way were certainly elements.

Yeah. Great. Let's talk about Digital Realty. I checked the share price earlier this morning. We're up $180, which by my math sort of implies a market cap of, you know, north of 60 billion enterprise value, north of 80 billion today. Tell us about, you know, the company. I think most people are familiar with the company, but why are you relevant and maybe a little bit about the assets you have and why you think they're unique and sort of differentiate yourself from others in the market.

Sure. And just one other aside that has a good interlock as well. So when I left and joined Digital as a client in 2015, I was a newly minted managing director. I kind of worked all these years to get to that and I was like now I'm going to leave it. It was so I wasn't actually had ambitions to leave banking and this opportunity at Digital came upon me. But also another opportunity from another deal that I'd actually been working with Gil Mena on from Goodwin that had a similar opportunity that was in the office asset class and I know office is coming back and I'm a big believer of work from office and all these things but like what the next now 11 years would pretend for data centers and office were certainly different trajectories. When I joined Digital I think we had 500 maybe customers probably same amount of employees largely US I think our enterprise value was maybe 13-14 billion and now we're $80 billion. And that wasn't that's not necessarily a technology story we didn't invent something this is they're still in the physical hard assets the infrastructure, data centers, connectivity. So it was through M&A, acquisitions, new market entry, scaling, globalizing our company that now brings us today at this platform that's supporting nearly 6,000 customers on six continents. We're the only player in my opinion both in the public and private world that fully embraces the full customer product spectrum. So our 6,000 customers are our hyperscale customers, the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, you name it, where we're helping in 30, 40, 50 locations around the world. And we're helping them with their network needs, the transmission of data. We're helping them with their access to their cloud. We're helping with their computing of the cloud where the cloud actually lives. The cloud does not float into the ether. It sits in four walls in major markets in architectures of redundancy within that metropolitan area and we're helping them with their AI be it their training, their inference and all the agent workflows that are going to come that then extends itself to the other tail end of our customers where our global enterprises the likes of JP Morgan, other major financial services companies, Deutsche Bank, manufacturing companies, healthcare companies, retail companies, that are putting a portion of their workloads inside Digital's four walls connecting to those clouds connecting to those AI use cases and other service providers and offering a global platform for their digital transformation, cloud computing and now artificial needs. And we're across that full spectrum on a global basis now stretched to 55 metropolitan markets and growing.

So we've seen some new customers arrive in the marketplace over the last couple years. The Neoclouds as they've been coined, you know, leading the ways, CoreWeave. How have you seen that customer base of yours over the last 10 or 11 years evolve and how are you, you know, how are you thinking about underwriting new customers like the Neoclouds as a new segment?

So really predating my days at Digital, the company has a proud heritage of making bold bets on customers that you didn't know what was going to play out. I had the opportunity to meet Marc Benioff at a dinner a few months ago and I heard lore of this that Digital was the first Salesforce data center in downtown San Francisco. And he even remembered the salesperson's name from that transaction probably the earliest days of Salesforce which was amazing. Facebook now Meta is another example of that that landed with us in the valley and it's only grown since. So we are certainly at the forefront of like looking at new business models, looking at new technologies, looking at new customers. We can't do this in any reckless fashion. We're not speculators in that. We have the fortune of tremendous size, scale, diversity, balance sheet strength to take bets and where not to take bets. I think the Neocloud evolution has been a remarkable story. Really on the backs of this now AI GPU era with Nvidia and Jensen really trying to find new routes for customers, new routes for GPUs, new routes for accelerators, really launching a thousand ships so that others beyond the likes of the hyperscalers could be in this arena and could bring more infrastructure to bear. We've supported these customers. We're proud to support these customers. But we're also in a day where the demand was strong from digital transformation, was strong from cloud computing and AI is just an incremental inflection on top of that from some of the biggest companies in the world. So we're naturally diversifying and mitigating risk in that category. I think what they've done as a category has been amazing. I think their next leg of growth is how do they cement their permanency? I think they've got a big uphill battle despite their success because they're in this arena of the trillion dollar company club that have other businesses. But I can tell you in my seat I am rooting for them because I want more big customers. I want more proliferation of different technology providers because I think the ecosystem, the technology, everything benefits from that and certainly us as their data center provider.

Yeah. Talking about you and how you've differentiated yourself a little bit amongst your customers and against competitors. When we look at the competitive landscape, you know, the other large data center REIT out there is Equinix. There's other publicly traded companies that have data center businesses, emerging businesses, and it's something still sort of somewhat nascent but growing. But I think importantly there's been, you know, four or five take privates in the space with QTS, CyrusOne, CoreSite and Switch. All who are growing now with private capital, among others out there large private capital. How do you compete against those companies on the private cap who have private capital seemingly, you know, endless pockets? And they don't have to report on a quarterly basis like you do to public market investors. They definitely have a different shareholding composition. How do you compete against those private capital players?

So some would have had the view going back to those take privates and the view of the future that wow the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and I'm sure they look at us when they're sometimes struggling to fund raise for that next dollar and say wow Digital's got this great currency they can raise capital super efficiently. I think there's two elements that are very pertinent to that question. One, if you look at the two segments of our business, let's talk about enterprise colo for half a second. Private capital has basically put that aside, not because it's not a great business with a massive TAM that's growing high single digits, but ourselves and our other public competitor have been at the forefront of consolidation and really for those customers provide the only global solution for those customers. So we in that category are taking share and growing taking share from a long list of cats and dogs behind us and the one ahead of us. It took us a long while to get in that arena to be equipped to do that. But I was proud to put up 35% increased new signings in that category this year. We added 600 new customers to our approaching 6,000 customer base. Some household names, Lucas Films, major financial services firms, global businesses, Novo Nordisk Foundation, those are picking Digital to grow with us and that's about market share in a platform effect. When it came to hyperscale, we took a different posture. We said we don't want 100% of your business and you don't want us to have 100% of your business. We're going to focus on where we have some type of competitive angle, something that differentiators to add more value to you, where it's hard to do business. We've got this irreplaceable runway capacity. Your folks on the operational ground level love working with us and that's maybe 30 of our 50 plus metropolitan areas and that's where we're going to just move the needle for those customers and deliver a little bit more alpha. The second thing we did is despite being 80 billion enterprise public company investor grade rating we said you know we need to harness private capital to work with us. Why does all the private capital have to funnel its way to 57th Street, Hudson Yards or Park Avenue to find its way into great data centers? So we know what first we're going to do some joint ventures and then we evolved into our own asset manager and we raised our first inaugural data center fund, three and a quarter billion equity, 10 billion of asset value spend. And we're going to build upon that with incremental vehicles so they can be private capital can get access to invest right alongside us while they have meaningful stakes in these vehicles. They've got our expertise in good times for data centers and bad times for data centers. They've got know that we're only doing this. We didn't start in this because AI became cool and we want to rotate in this. We've been here for 20 plus years. And we think this is going to be avenue for us to keep accelerating our growth and continue to grow assets under management in a category where many of their competitors are in finite life vehicles. They're going to have to recycle.

So how have public market investors reacted to that fund and that strategy, you know, taking away some of the opportunity for them or how have they?

I just spent the last 48 hours with some of our public market top public market investors at a conference which was it was a great it's nice to be in the data center category relative to a lot of the other traditional hard asset classes. No question about that. But despite liking our story, liking our industry, liking what we've done, it's a they want to have their cake and eat it too phenomenon. So when we basically did all this stuff on our balance sheet and dragged our earnings down, they said, 'Why are you doing that?' And then when we share some of these great projects with private capital, but get remunerated with property management fees, asset management fees, development fees, they're like, 'Why'd you give that away?' So, it's an evolution, but listen, I don't think that's just about us. I think that's a characterization of the markets are the markets don't invest on the same timelines as we as a company. And you got to listen to your investors always, but doesn't mean you have to follow them blindly at the same time.

Yeah. Okay. As we think about growth, a lot of that requires new development and land sourcing, land accessing, you've obviously got a big land pipeline and land bank, power bank. Power is the name of the game now. How are you sort of interacting with utilities? How are you getting trying to get ahead? Are you seeing partnerships? How are you seeing them reacting? They're obviously inundated with new applications. How are you handling that side of the demand equation?

So 300 data centers but we also talk in power or electrons. So that's we're operating 3 gigawatts today in our 300 plus data centers. On top of that from near delivery under construction shells pad ready land we own that's another five gigawatts of runway of growth for our customers across all those metropolitan areas I mentioned. And that's not enough. We're strategically adding to that all the time. What we found in the last few years is the acceleration of demand is way outpaced the constituents needed to deliver what was required. And that's the backdrop of really AI demand that accelerant being very US focused. That's with a grid in the United States that has lacked investment. That has been sunsetting one source of power for other sources of power that do not have the reliability or redundancy that is increasing capacity charges to utility complexes that they weren't geared for growth. I mean you could think of in the last 30-40 years the amount of manufacturing offshoring the electricity demand in this country was going like this and now it's like run the marathon at sprint pace. So what we found the best thing wasn't to throw our hands up and get frustrated with our utility partners but to lean in and really work with them. And there's been examples whether we went big into the Charlotte, North Carolina market and we got our hands on a site next to the airport for 400 megawatts that we had to lean in with our partner Duke and think of like let's how do we let you get us power sooner? What can we give back to you? Can we turn to our generators on those hot summer days in North Carolina or when the snow falls seldomly in the winter and give you relief for your grid and work with you? And that's something we've been doing at Digital for a long time, right? There's a lot of myths out there about our asset class. We're about investing, hardening the grid, lowering the cost for power in our jurisdictions, be good community citizens. The myth on water I can go on forever on, but adding more jobs, not just the building, the plumbers, electricians, the folks operating, but six more jobs for everyone inside of our data center in those markets. But that certainly that element was important with our utility partners all the way to you know what let us help you while you're getting back on your feet till the cavalry arrives let us bring bridge power solutions temporarily until you can build the transmission you can build the substations you can essentially fortify the grid on your timelines.

Okay. The other side of the equation around power is consumption of energy and sustainability. You know, how are you approaching sustainability? How has that evolved? We've seen a sort of shift in the views from the general market around that. How are you adapting and what's your policy and approach to that?

So despite you could say the broader mainstream media political rhetoric on this topic, I can tell you I'm proud to be supporting customers who yes, they're racing for more electrons. Yes, they're trying to get power as fast as possible, but they haven't lost the long-term principles of doing it in a sustainable fashion. So at Digital, we again 3 gigawatts operational this year. We reached another milestone of 90 plus percent of our power is green. Now we don't put up solar panels on the roofs and wind farms next to the data centers and do direct access. We're entering into long-term power purchase agreements for that type of infrastructure to green our grid at the same time as we're electrifying our data centers. So and we and our customers are continuing that commitment to do it in a long-term sustainable framework.

And the customers are they prepared to pay for that? Do they contribute to that? How do they?

Many of the customers will ask us to directly offset for them. Okay. If there's incremental cost, they will bear that incremental cost. I think the customers are very likeminded in listen they're trying to do the technologies that's going to change the world, but they also got to be good citizens of this world along the way.

Maybe we change topics and talk about some of the REIT market dynamics. You're investing in long-term assets. Multi-billion dollar campuses, enterprise in you know middle city downtown areas as well. But these are long-term assets and yet you've got shareholders out there who are seeing the share price every day. You're reporting quarter to quarter. How do you balance that long-term sort of NAV accretion and value creation versus, you know, constantly reporting on a quarterly basis?

Yes. So, we just had our board meeting a couple weeks ago and our chair Mary Hogan Pusy has just done an excellent job. She said something at the very start of the meeting that she says she doesn't envy me because and this is true for all public companies but especially as what you the backdrop you're describing of like these massive capital long-term technology trends that my job is to worry about one year, three year, five years and forever and doing all those at the same time is not ideal. I think in our evolution of Digital we've learned some lessons. In my 10 plus years in the company we very much learned in order to build this company we had to make sacrifices and those sacrifices to have a platform that strings six continents to have these irreplaceable connectivity assets to support 6,000 customers to have the full product spectrum came with the financial price of slowing our per share growth. And that's what was about activating private capital sources, how we approached hyperscale, doubling down on this enterprise colo interconnection strategy and get our flywheel of our constant currency going which is really that short end of that shareholder curve. It's pleasing the folks that can get in today and out tomorrow because they want it as fast as possible yesterday. But at the same time I have a disproportionate share of my eggs in the Digital basket. I'm on the probably younger side of many in my seat. I'm going to be here when the decisions I make today come home to roost in five or 10 years, right? Or I'm thinking like that to that forever equation. And it's a fine balance. How you think through that and it has ramifications on your investment decisions, your operationalization, who you lease to, how you do it, reputational ramifications. The pebble can set the monsoon off. So, it's a fine balancing act. I wish I could tell you I get it right all the time. I'm sure sometimes I lean too into worried about the future. Sometimes I lean too worried about the next minute. But it's a fine balance.

And managing REIT investor expectations is definitely challenging. Another area which is a sort of related topic on the private side, you know, at Deutsche Bank we've been actively involved in financing a lot of these companies and they've decided to use ABS, capital markets, CMBX to issue debt and grow their balance sheets and you know using those markets can be a very efficient form you can get certainly meaningful proceeds and at high ratings. You've on the other hand opted for a very strong investment grade unsecured balance sheet, more typical to what we see in REITs. But it comes at the expense of leverage. So you do have a more conservative approach. You see these other groups out there really driving their return on equity from using these capital markets products that seem to be sort of very receptive to your sector data centers. What's your philosophy on accessing those markets? It must be tempting to see, you know, getting very efficient pricing, proceeds, high return on equity debt does come with some considerations around it but how do you think Digital Realty is well suited to adopting to these products?

So that dovetails with the product comments of don't make private capital your foe make it your friend. Right? And we operate in the world where our public headstock has got to generate outsized growth versus everybody else and do it at conservative leverage levels. The financial engineering is not a card we get to pull necessarily in that format. Yeah. But tapping into these vehicles or assets under management or private capital that's where we can access the same types of structures. I think there's a broader theme happening here. We were investment grade rated. I wasn't in Digital. I was on the banking side helping the company from the outside in December of 2009. Got triple B, triple B equivalent, triple B equivalent from all three agencies. I think it took till 2025 to get one of them to like notch us up to triple B plus equivalent. Crazy commentary on the rating agencies maybe. Better late than never. Along the way, there was this theme of oh well you can't finance these assets on a secured non-recourse basis. You can't they're unfinancable. Which was not accurate because Digital Realty had CMBS on its portfolio went public with in 2004. And that myth got busted along the way. And then it was, well, these assets don't trade like real estate assets. They're not going to trade like at cap rates or things like that. And we've shown that that's not the case as well. I think we as an asset class aside from in addition to I should say our customers are just running into capital needs that no one ever saw. So all these avenues need to be exploited, right? And you're seeing our customers evolve from capital light businesses to capital intense businesses and turning to us to be that home. I always said like why they wanted to put their dollars in data centers which our returns are great for infrastructure and real estate but our technology is not sending rockets to the moon or cloud computing or driverless cars or all this innovation with artificial intelligence. But they're figuring it out that they need to turn to us and different access to capital and I think that this is going to be a natural evolution where folks are going to say am I going to invest in office or multifamily or industrial or data centers or

bridges or roads or towers or data centers, this confluence of infrastructure and real estate that I think we have an asset class that has tremendous long-term demand trends, supply as I mentioned wellfully behind and tough maybe never catching up, and some of the best credits on the planet as the customers, which is very intuitive to call the real estate world, the infrastructure world, public investors and private investors, real asset community.

So our evolution of our funding model, first we went down the road of let's joint venture stabilize portfolios of data centers and we tried to make these as vanilla ice cream for a data center as possible, most pristine credits, long whales, the best markets, and we were able to actuate that on several multiple billion dollar portfolios. We then partnered with Blackstone on a development joint venture and that brought us to, you know, what we can probably do what the middleman's doing better than they can in our opinion. Luckily there's so much opportunity that there's going to be those folks investing as well. And that brought us to LP world, private capital world and our initial foray was we need to educate folks about data centers. Despite Digital Realty being a public company for nearly 22 years and everyone knowing what data centers is and everyone talking about it, they needed to really hear our story of what we do differently, how we approach this. And that brought us to our first closed-end fund. And we were very pleased to bring a who's who of investors from sovereign wealth funds to pension funds, insurance companies to the Asia, Canada, US, Europe, you name it. And this is a strategic initiative for us. This isn't just a solve a capital need. Quite honestly, our balance sheet's below five times that we don't need the capital. This is about building a franchise as one of the best homes to invest privately in data centers. Yes, you can buy Digital Realty which has got great dividend, great growth, great balance sheet, but we're supporting 6,000 customers on six continents. There's complexity. There's gigawatts of land. There's under construction. There's moving parts. Maybe someone wants to just invest in a portfolio of our data centers that has Ashburn, Santa Clara, Dallas, Microsoft, an Amazon type customer, a LinkedIn, a Meta, a very diverse, stable and growing type portfolio. So that was this roadmap we're on with our private capital. And again, it's not just a tool for us to seed capital with because we're honestly we're at a best place we've been in for capital and balance sheet in years on what we have today and our access to public capital. It's more of like we want to build a flagship in this arena for folks to turn to us and we're not inventing this road map. We're stealing from some great folks that did this in the industrial asset class or other asset classes.

So let's step back. Why are we a global company? We're not a global company because we think we're better investors than everybody else and we can do it in all these different countries better than everybody else. We're a global company because we have a global customer base. So our hyperscale customers, service providers, corporate enterprises want a one-stop shop for their hybrid cloud, IT, cloud computing and AI needs. For the first over half, for two-thirds of my time at Digital was large-scale M&A transactions, public to public, private portfolios, joint ventures, new market expansions and did tremendous consolidation to stretch us to these continents and metropolitan areas. What we've been putting together now is some dots on the map that we needed to fill in. We're not going the, what we've announced these string of connectivity hubs around the Mediterranean, they're not random countries. They're not random spots on the map. This is where subsea cables are coming into Europe, from Asia, from India, from Africa, connecting to the United States and data flows are happening like irreplaceable locations when it comes to data centers bringing the world more connected, more technology to more parts of the world. And that's what the story was whether it was Monday's announcement in Bulgaria or Lisbon. These aren't big, we're natural buyers for them and we often are onboarding a team because this business in my view is a blend of global and local. We have to give global standards, consistent customer experience, but also we're not flying people in to Paris to help them with their data center needs. You need boots on the ground. You're dealing with the utility. You're dealing with the community. You're dealing with infrastructure. And that's been that playbook of what we've done in Malaysia, Indonesia, and in certain expansions into Charlotte and Atlanta, have been similarly suited.

Just like we're focused the full customer spectrum and we're bringing on precious colo capacity and connectivity offerings for our customers all over the globe and also developing 100 megawatt buildings on gigawatt campuses. We are focused on looking at both opportunities when it comes to the latter or the former, the smaller more precious more platform oriented that is more stuff that we just integrate on the balance sheet and the bigger stuff that is more hyperscale, more financial attuned. That is more where we're harnessing our private capital and allowing those private capitals to grow their investment with us into those projects that may have some stabilized assets that are hyperscale under construction and future runway for growth.

So I think what you're going to see is all the above is going to be deployed given the size of capital. I think you're going to see funds extend lives just because projects are, there's no like perfect start and stops to businesses. They're moving machinery at all times. You're going to see private recapitalizations at an asset level, a portfolio level, a company level. You're going to see public vehicles of all shapes and sizes. What I've found which has had a lot of learnings of spending a lot of time helping companies go public, raise public capital, navigate the public markets and then for over a decade inside a company that has probably tried everything under the sun when it comes to this is you got to, everyone wants their cake and eat it too and that seems impossible but you got to get them pretty close to that. And that means architecting your business model and your balance sheet and your funding sources and your growth to deliver as close to that as possible. So we learned lessons at Digital that we basically we ground our cost of capital to a halt at the sacrifice of making longer-term investments that our shareholders weren't ready to reward us for. Right? That was things that we wouldn't be as attractive to our customers or delivering the returns or growth we are today if we hadn't done that. But it was painful. It was painful personally. It was painful to our shareholders. And we had to just have the perseverance that we're going to get through this. This wasn't a permanent feature. But that leads me back to I think when I look at the landscape of folks out there that could go public, I think it's going to be a more challenging road of longer term. Not to get public. Yeah, you could say you can get public deal size. Maybe you bankers are all smarter than me these days on how to figure that one out. But I just think people want growth, low balance sheet, organic pricing power, organic growth, development, and they want it right now. So those ingredients all in the bowl doesn't usually yield the perfect dish easily.

And the best thing I've learned from, my best reminder I've had from being in my seat around this whole dynamic of cost of capital, pleasing shareholders is never underestimate the law of large numbers. Big companies have to do big growth and it's very challenging to do the bigger you get. And I think you're going to see a lot of these companies who are not small companies by any means start to run into that when they think about their virtuous cycle and their growth algorithm.

I think where you do it, how you do it, and who you do it with are going to be three elements to me. We've focused on markets that a simple thing that I hope everyone in this room remembers, location, location, location. It's not the people, it's the zeros and ones, the bits and bytes have to be in these locations. And we're in an era of AI-driven data centers that don't have that current necessity right now. And that's something that at some point worries me. I think the how you do it, the price tag of entry is getting very large. There's no cheap land anymore in data center land. The utilities are growing up, maturing their processes and asking for big boy commitments, massive letters of credit, take or pay on the power and that front end of risk. Land. My CIO and partner always reminds me land needs three meals a day. Land that is very expensive that doesn't have an alternative use other than data centers with a contract for power that you need to put a big letter of credit deposit on and you need to take the power. That is like a monster that they're eating six meals a day. And then lastly and we talked about new customers and taking risk. I think thinking through the business models of new customers and how long these customers really have moat and relevance in such a rapidly changing technology landscape is very important.

So the broader customer preference still remains the grid. So we're focused on mission critical applications supporting hospitals, financial services, health and safety, running every transaction that is happening in the digital world and the grid is just one incremental element of redundancy in it. So we in the United States have a piecemeal grid that has interconnection regions and isolated regions and regulatory. So what we're doing to supplement that is essentially two things. Like the example I mentioned in Charlotte or what we're doing in Northern Virginia is we're essentially helping our grid partners saying when you, the grid's built for the peaks right and can we help you on those peak days by let's saying, you know what we won't take any of your power that day we'll use our generators that we have as our parachute for that day. So those are elements that are allowing our grid partners to say, you know what if you make sure this hot, this cold day, I don't need to be feeding you with all these megawatts or gigawatts. I can give you power sooner. So, that's happening. Two, these island solutions where we're basically through easements bringing natural gas to our sites building electrification plants essentially in bridging fashion. So, we know the grid's coming. We know they're building the transmission lines. We know they're building the substations. It's just going to take them a couple years to get this all done. We can self-help ourselves. So, we've done, we're working on something in Dublin like that who just changed some policy on that. We're looking at some other markets in the United States. The goal is not to be an island forever. That is not the goal. The goal is let's wait till the cavalry arrives. Let's help them in the interim and bring our customers infrastructure online sooner. So, those are examples where we're essentially trying to partner with the utility because we need to work together to make that happen. We can't just build those things on ourselves and be totally separate from those utility partners.

So that is a real and rapidly growing constraint that has never hit the space to the extent it is right now. It's unfortunately in my opinion a bit of a shoehorn political issue in a midterm election year in the states. And what I've found is folks that have been very activated on this don't let the facts get in the way of a good story. You have to bear with me on my public service announcement here, but if you look at the elements of what we're doing, mission critical applications, not crypto miners, running the digital economy, everything you're doing from when you wake up till you go to bed that has anything digital is coming through a data center, right? Mission critical electrification. We didn't sunset power sources and strain capacity. We didn't sparse our investment in the grids. That's what the entire United States and many parts of the world did. And now we're trying to help them catch up in a time where there's technological advancement when I'm an AI optimist and I think digital is going to lead the way and supporting in the right way. But I don't think people understand that we don't have a choice, right? Because this stuff is going to happen somewhere in this world and we can let this economy grow here in the United States in the right way or we can let the technology economy grow in less favored adversaries. But power as I mentioned we're giving back to the grid. We're strengthening the grid. The studies show states without data centers power increases have been much bigger than states with data centers. My favorite one is the water myth. A data center uses as much water as a McDonald's. We at 300 data centers worldwide is less water than 18 California golf courses. I learned there's 16,000 golf courses in the United States. Then there's less than half of that in the world. The jobs, we're getting great jobs for people to build this infrastructure and then operate this infrastructure. We're struggling to bring people into the workforce and learn what we're doing. Engineers, these are these great paying career jobs. And then every job we have in our data center is sixfold outside in terms of the economy. So but it's the onus is on us and we own it to make the commitments to let people know that we were here before AI. We've been here for 20 plus years. We're part of your community. We're giving back. We're doing the right ways. We're picking locations that are the right locations for data centers. We're doing it in a green way. We're doing it in a way to help you. And we're doing it because we need to do this for technology and advancement.