Commercial real estate just had its best July in twenty years, and the reason isn’t offices, apartments, or strip malls. It’s data centers, the sprawling, power-hungry facilities that house the servers keeping AI models, cloud platforms, and streaming services alive.
National data center transaction volume hit $7.7B in the second quarter of 2026 across just 23 deals, representing a staggering 1,806% increase year-over-year. For the first half of 2026, total data center volumes reached $8.5B, up 476% from the same period last year.
One deal, massive ripple effects
The single largest contributor to these numbers was Digital Realty’s $5.6B acquisition of four data center properties from Blackstone. That transaction alone accounted for nearly half of Northern Virginia’s $11.5B in total CRE sales volume during the first half of 2026.
Broader CRE investment sales in Q2 2026 reached $136.6B, a 14% year-over-year increase according to MSCI data. Portfolio-level and entity-level deals provided much of the lift, with the Digital Realty-Blackstone transaction serving as the poster child for how a handful of mega-deals can move the needle on an entire asset class.
