For decades, global real estate revolved around what could be seen — gleaming office towers, shopping malls, and trophy hotels, but that has increasingly shifted to “invisible” property: cloud and data centers.
“The world of real estate is changing from what I’d call the ‘visible’ to the ‘invisible,’” said Kishore Moorjani, CEO of CapitaLand Investment’s alternatives and private funds team.
″[It’s] everything we can’t see but we use: the cloud, as we like calling it, lives in the data center,” he noted during a panel at the Milken Institute Asia Summit held in Singapore. “That’s what’s driving the value shift.”
According to a recent 2025 data center investor interest survey by real estate services firm CBRE, 95% of major investors worldwide plan to increase their investments in data centers. Of the 92 major investors polled, 41% said that they planned to allocate $500 million or more in equity to the data center sector in 2025, compared to 30% last year.
Data center demand has surged in recent years, largely driven by the explosion in AI workloads, which require vast computing power, electrical power, cooling and networking infrastructure. Goldman Sachs forecasts that global power demand from data centers will rise 50% by 2027 and by as much as 165% by 2030.
