Latest automated power publications

Investment in smart cities is growing worldwide. According to information from Statista, “Technology spending on smart city initiatives worldwide is forecast to more than double between 2018 and 2023, increasing from 81 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 to 189.5 billion in 2023.”

The top five data centre REITs have a combined market cap approaching $100bn, while aggregated revenues for the top ten biggest DC operators are around $18bn.

Hoya Capital defines wholesale data centres as serving larger customers, with long leases of 5-15 years. It says, “data centre REITs own roughly 30 percent of investment-grade data centre facilities in the US and command roughly a fifth of data centre capacity globally.”

Companies and REITs have typically built their reputations for uptime and security by providing critical infrastructure at scale through Tier 3+ facilities, usually with 2N or N+1 UPS and N+1 or 2 back-up generators and dual-path infrastructure as standard. In power terms, redundancy was king.