Welcome back. Hope some of you got some coffee to get the caffeine rolling in the afternoon. I will expose my bias in having the pleasure and honor of Andy join us, as I'm a data center junkie. I've been around data centers for 20 plus years since the dawn of data centers in the background, and I write all about them a lot. As I said in my opening remarks, the construction of data centers constitutes the penumbra of industries that entails the communications, the internal infrastructure is the biggest physical infrastructure ever built by humanity. It sounds like a bold statement but it's true. We have a data center company which you probably have never heard of if you're a cognition. The first thing I want to ask Andy to tell you about is just a couple minutes, not corporate advertising, because it'll give you some context. What is Digital Realty? Because you've heard of Meta, you've heard of Google, you've heard of Amazon's data centers. Andy, thanks for coming.
Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Digital Realty, like Mark said, for 20 plus years, public company solely focused on building, owning, and operating data centers. So we are essentially the physical manifestation of the digital economy. We are supporting nearly 6,000 customers. So the likes of corporate enterprise, major financial services companies, manufacturing companies, all the way to the hyperscale cloud companies, Google's, Amazon's, Microsofts of the world, with the physical infrastructure for their servers, their software, the technology that is letting you check your phone in the morning, buy your coffee, shopping, do your work, stream your Netflix, everything that's running online and at scale.
So you told me it's measured in power. You're running about 3 gigawatts. You have a gigawatt under construction.
A little more than that. Yep.
A pipeline for another few. So let's round it to you're a potentially, you're a public company so you can't, but I'll say 10, potentially 10 gigawatt data center infrastructure company in the near future. I remind everybody for calibration that's the power of a city of five million people that you can support. So in terms of scale, because I made a point of scale of individual data centers that are now being built compared to a decade ago where 10 megawatts, 50 megawatts, that was a big data center. Are we, are you unique? Are we in new territory? I mean we know the question answers itself. What does that do to the actual construction process and the upstream requirements and power when you move at scales and are the scales that you're seeing, what are they typical in the industry?
Sure. So as you mentioned, we're operating today, I could tour you through 3 gigawatts of data centers in 55 metropolitan areas. We're building close to a gig and a half. That is nearly $17 billion. Within that we could have a single building that is 100 megawatts and that could be 1.5 billion. That is a million and a half square feet. Think about parking one to two aircraft carriers inside the building. These are just massive scaled infrastructure that we're bringing online faster now than we've ever had. It's multifaceted. So digital transformation is happening every day with businesses. The cloud is a half a trillion dollar market growing at close to 30%. And we're just at the early days of artificial intelligence as incremental demand drivers for this infrastructure coming online.
So you're talking about, of course you're building in anticipation of growth, but you don't build guessing there's growth. To cut to the root of what I hear constantly, is this a bubble and that it's going to burst? So you reacted to demand that comes from the market that wants the physical facilities. So simple question is, does it feel like based on the order book a bubble? How far out can you see and if you were guessing, again you have fiduciary responsibilities, if you're guessing how far away are we away from peak data center construction, can you see it?
So we're essentially at a place where we cannot keep up with the demand. The physical infrastructure that our customers are needing for the bits and bytes are moving way faster than the picks and shovels and the construction and supply chain. I don't look at this as we're at some bubble period. I think we're just getting going on a massive, large-scale, capital-intensive buildout of digital infrastructure. When we transact, we're transacting with the trillion-dollar companies or some of our biggest customers. They're not signing up for short-term contracts. They're signing up for 15 years or longer duration contracts for buildings. They may not even deliver for 18 months in some cases. So you think we're talking about commitments that are going to range from where we got going to the last day of the first contract to 20 years potentially. These companies are on this long-term growth and it's a multifaceted growth. Like I said, it's not just about artificial intelligence. It's not just about cloud computing. It's not just about digital transformation. Yes, we're serving these trillion-dollar hyperscale customers, but we have 6,000 customers. Numerous other businesses are using this infrastructure to automate their workflows, bring new innovation, start new businesses. And it's critical with the infrastructure we deliver.
You keep coming back to this point. I think it's a really important one. The news is dominated by the hyperscalers for obvious reasons. They're big companies, multi-trillion dollar companies, but there are thousands and thousands of companies. So you have 6,000 customers, which is customers doesn't mean that it's one of us individually that are renting space in your data center. These are businesses and enterprises, thousands of them, that are using your physical facility either renting servers or putting servers in cages, right, physical cages in your buildings. So you're responding to this huge efflorescence of demand coming from enterprises. So when you look at that and you think about you have a fiduciary and a practical duty, but the practical question is when you're building at this scale, this velocity, 18 months, 100 megawatts, 200 megawatts, so where are you getting the power now, where do you think you're going to get the power 18 months from now, and where do you think you're going to get the power 36 months from now? Will they be the same and what's actually going on on the front lines?
So I would say all of the above is the short answer to that question, and especially if you extend it beyond 36 because some of the innovation coming in the nuclear field will eventually come into the picture. But now we're massive amounts of grid power, reliability, it's we're working hand in hand with our utility partners and investing in substations to expedite their deliveries. We also are looking at, call it, bridging behind-the-meter solutions, right? We want to help when utilities are focused on transmission lines and other things. And you have to use all of it. And to me, the need for this critical infrastructure is so vast and so rapid need that it's not one fighting the other, right? And we're not competing with the utilities with a solution, we're helping the utilities when they need a little bit of help in a project here or there.
So the, and of course I'll do a point of privilege by disputing the common term of art that you and everybody uses, behind the meter. I've been peddling the idea that we should change the nomenclature to public and private grids. Not that they're mutually exclusive. There's always a meter. Somebody's always paying. The question is who pays and how do you build a facility? Which of course brings up the obvious question, and I mentioned in my opening remarks too, is that you and I have talked about this, is that the sudden eruption, and it feels like a very sudden eruption, of a data center resistance movement. Part of that resistance is sort of an inchoate anger with AI and social media. So you blame Meta and their data centers. I mean you can see that's where the social media lives, the physical equipment. You can see that. But a lot of it has been driven by the claim that data centers are responsible for making electricity unaffordable. The affordability crisis, in air quotes, has been pinned on to data centers. You know you are on the receiving end of this. So tell us a bit about your perspective on the claims, but also the claims are real and the political movements are very real. What are you guys doing about it?
So I don't have enough time for the long version of that answer. But I think first off, the term the cloud is probably the worst term that could have come to our space because everyone just thinks the data floats into the ether and magically appears on your devices and there's nothing behind that. In our four walls, in our 300 plus data centers, lives the cloud. It sits in, we're the infrastructure where our customer servers and chips are making the cloud happen for you. I think we're at such a much important time in the world and in this country around this that we've, I believe at Digital, have been unsung heroes and just quiet about it for a long time doing our business, contributing, but now we got to be a little bit more out there and communicate, hey, fact and fiction here. When it comes to grid, we're investing alongside the utilities to strengthen the grid. We're there in those hot summer nights here in Northern Virginia when we can go to our redundant power sources and ease the grid and lower cost, as you've seen from many of our customers who made commitments to that. The jobs, for a long time we don't take a lot of resources because we don't fill our data centers with oodles of people. But when you add it up, the data center industry in the US is bigger than the automobile industry in terms of workers today. We're big contributors for taxes that gives the best schools, teachers, sports fields, roads, you name it. The water, we at Digital operate 300 data centers worldwide. Our business consumes less than the water consumption of 18 California golf courses, and there's 16,000 golf courses just in the United States. So yeah. But we just can't stop because this is so critical of a time here. You think of any leap in technology, when it was going to mobile device, mobile computing, computing in general, all the way back to the building of roads and international airports. We're at a place where we as an industry, and I think Digital is doing its best to lead on that, to understand that this is critical. Like we do not want to be left behind in this next technology, and it's not just security, which is certainly on the forefront, it's where is the economy around the next technological innovation going to happen? Is it going to happen here in the United States or is it going to happen abroad?
Well, you know, here's sort of my forensic from the outside looking in, is that the data center industry, which is essentially only a two-decade-old industry. It began in, as you know, 1998 in Santa Clara with the first data center that the industry really started expanding post-Y2K. So it's a new industry and as a participant and observer that I've noticed over the two decades that the industry is unknown to most people. The word data center was an alien term, was like an office center, what is that? And it was generally admired as an industry if you're working in it, people liked you. So, wow, you're building that stuff. And now it's a little bit of a culture shock to realize, wait, wait a minute, we're the bad guys. And I think you're right. What you describe is essentially an old-fashioned industrial communications problem because the infrastructure of the internet and the cloud are physical and require social license. So I think you guys are doing a good job. All of it, not just Digital Realty, the whole industry is now waking up to the fact that they have to do a better job explaining why they have a social license to operate and do things in some cases that are palliatives to help consumers realize, and of course most people don't know the things they love to do like streaming videos, shopping, those are made possible. They live inside of the data centers. Our story is not about power generation, distribution, HVAC. Our story is about the transaction at the grocery store. It's supply chains. It's financial services online, healthcare, first responders.
