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. CBRE generated nearly $700 million in data center revenue in Q3 2025 alone, up 40% year-over-year, with leasing revenue in the segment doubling over the same period. Data centers are expected to account for roughly 10% of CBRE's total earnings in 2026.

McKinsey estimates that $6.7 trillion in data center investment will be needed globally by 2030, driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data consumption.

In a milestone that would have been unthinkable five years ago, 2026 marked the first year that data center construction surpassed traditional office development in 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 a 270-acre farm in Saline Township, Michigan for a multibillion-dollar campus that will serve OpenAI and Oracle as part of a project called "Stargate." The campus is planned at 2.2 million square feet and would require rezoning approximately 575 acres of farmland.

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 now employs over 150 data center brokers globally, plus hundreds more in engineering and operations. Eastdil Secured and Colliers have also built dedicated practices.

"It used to be a lot easier," said Rob Walters of Eastdil Secured, who completed his first data center deal in 2002. "You just had to simply make a request, and within a month or two later, you had the exact amount of power you wanted."

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 the "Magnificent Seven" tech companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — plus a handful of AI-focused firms like OpenAI and Oracle. Industry growth rates of 15 to 20 percent annually are projected, but a pullback from any of these hyperscale tenants could ripple across the sector.

As JLL broker Jason Bell put it: the growth is being driven by "three factors: AI, cloud, and data growth." For CRE brokers, data centers have become what one industry observer described as "the new oil fields."