Data Centers Are CRE's New Gold Rush — and Brokers Are Cashing In

While traditional office leasing sputters and capital markets remain choppy across much of the commercial real estate landscape, one asset class has emerged as an undeniable juggernaut: data centers.

The Scale of the Opportunity

The numbers are staggering. Major brokerages including CBRE and JLL have seen rapid growth in their data center practices, driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data consumption.

In a milestone that would have been unthinkable five years ago, data center construction has surged to rival — and in some measures surpass — traditional office development across the United States.

Billion-Dollar Deals

Deal sizes have scaled dramatically. What were once considered large 10-megawatt transactions are now routine. Current projects are measured in hundreds of megawatts, with the largest exceeding half a gigawatt.

Among the most notable: Related Digital, the data center arm of Jeff Blau's Related Companies, is under contract to acquire farmland in Michigan for a multibillion-dollar campus that will serve OpenAI and Oracle as part of a project called "Stargate."

A New Breed of Broker

The talent pool skews younger than traditional CRE, with many top data center brokers under 50. The work is more complex than conventional real estate — brokers must handle land identification, power validation, fiber access, proximity to substations, floodplain and zoning analysis, water access for cooling, environmental review, tenant sourcing, and multi-tranche construction financing.

JLL, Eastdil Secured, and Colliers have all built dedicated data center practices, each employing growing teams of specialized brokers and engineers to handle the asset class's technical demands.

Power constraints have reshaped the entire origination process. Locking in grid capacity now often determines whether a deal gets done at all — a reality that brokers who started in data center before the AI boom recall as a much simpler era.

Geographic Spread

Northern Virginia remains the world's largest data center market, but Dallas, Phoenix, and a growing list of emerging locations — including Tulsa, Columbus, rural Pennsylvania, and Indiana — are attracting massive investment as developers chase available power and favorable land costs.

The Tenant Concentration Risk

The opportunity comes with a caveat: the tenant pool is highly concentrated around a handful of major hyperscale cloud operators — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — plus a growing roster of AI-focused firms like OpenAI and Oracle. Strong growth is projected across the sector, but a pullback from any of these hyperscale tenants could ripple across the market.

For CRE brokers, data centers have emerged as one of the most active and lucrative corners of the industry, commanding technical expertise and relationships that traditional leasing work rarely required.

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Fees Follow Technical Execution

Large potential commissions do not make data-center assignments easy to close. Brokers need to understand power delivery, fiber, water and cooling, security, permitting, and the difference between announced and usable capacity. A site can control valuable land yet fail the tenant's energization schedule.

Concentration creates another risk. A small number of hyperscalers can command terms and alter deployment plans, leaving intermediaries with long pursuits that never close. Professionals should measure the opportunity by executed site control, utility milestones, and completed capacity—not press-release megawatts. Specialized diligence and credible utility relationships are likely to matter more than conventional leasing volume.