Digital Realty just put a price tag on what institutional-grade AI infrastructure is worth. The data center giant paid $27 million per megawatt for three leased AI data centers, a figure that effectively sets a new valuation benchmark for stabilized AI infrastructure assets.
To put that number in context: recent lease valuations in competitive, high-power markets have ranged from $400,000 to $550,000 per megawatt. Lower-quality data center sites trade between $100,000 and $250,000 per megawatt. The $27 million per megawatt figure isn’t a lease rate. It’s an acquisition price, reflecting what a buyer is willing to pay for a fully operational, revenue-generating AI data center on a per-megawatt basis.
Why megawatts are the new metric that matters
Digital Realty, listed on the NYSE as DLR, operates over 300 data centers across more than 55 metropolitan areas on six continents. It’s the world’s largest cloud- and carrier-neutral data center REIT, which means it doesn’t play favorites with any single cloud provider.
The company signed over $1 billion in new leases in 2025, for the second consecutive year. Digital Realty also announced a partnership with NVIDIA in November 2025 to build an AI Factory Research Center. The company took home “AI Data Centre of the Year” at the 2024 Datacloud Global Awards.
