No surprise then that entities such as Prologis, better known as a logistics REIT, and fund manager Blackstone are muscling in on building and acquiring data centres through joint ventures with data centre operators.
Data centres are in demand, driven by the increased adoption of technologies such as cloud services, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI), and perhaps even quantum computing, data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT). The list goes on.
Just imagine anything on social media goes on the cloud. According to DataReportal and Demandsage, as of October 2023, there were 5.3 billion Internet users worldwide, which amounted to 65.7% of the global population. Of this total, 4.95 billion, or 61.4% of the world’s population, were social media users. The global social media users are forecast to reach 5.17 billion by the end of 2024. Facebook is the biggest social media platform, with 3.05 billion users.
