Dennis Wilkin was planting soybeans last spring on his 270-acre farm in Saline Township, Michigan, when two men pulled up in a pickup truck.
They climbed out and handed him a proposal to buy his land, along with a questionnaire that dug into everything from how long he’d been farming to his personal background. Wilkin still isn’t entirely sure whether the visitors worked for Related Digital, the data center arm of Jeff Blau’s Related Companies, or a commercial real estate brokerage. It didn’t really matter.
“To be honest, I didn’t care,” Wilkin said. “They gave me an offer and their questionnaire, and I sent it back with a counter.”
Wilkin is now under contract to sell his farm to Related Digital for a multibillion-dollar data center campus that will help power ChatGPT maker OpenAI, though he declined to say for how much.
As deals like Wilkin’s proliferate, a growing contingent of commercial brokers, some possibly in pickup trucks, is working quietly behind the scenes (and under nondisclosure agreements) to bring these massive transactions to the finish line.
Data centers, once an unglamorous niche specialty, have become one of the most lucrative revenue streams for brokerages. Office leasing in much of the country still sputters and capital markets remain choppy, but data centers are emerging as a bright spot, generating outsized fees, attracting young talent and reshaping how firms think about land, power and geography.
Unlike brokers in other commercial sectors who tend to specialize in either capital markets or office leasing, data center brokers often straddle both sales and leasing. They scour the market for land suitable for new centers and underused industrial properties ripe for conversion. They also negotiate sales and leases for a growing pipeline of data centers being developed by firms looking to cash in on the artificial intelligence gold rush, for which consulting firm McKinsey estimates that data centers will require $6.7 trillion in investment by 2030 to keep up with demand.
“A big bump-up in activity.”
“The growth rate in this industry is double digits, 15 to 20 percent annual growth, because of three factors: AI, cloud and data growth,” JLL data center broker Jason Bell said. Everyone’s using data: “The amount of data that comes through your cell phone just keeps going on and on,” he said. It’s transforming the industry.
“That’s why we’re so excited,” he added.
The stakes have risen as data center projects have grown larger and more capital-intensive. Years-long contingencies can depend on confirmation that a site can get enough power and the local electeds will approve rezonings. Even with solid credit behind them, financing for data centers has become more complex, often requiring multiple tranches and lenders, a time-consuming process that’s harder than it looks, Raul Saavedra, head of Colliers’ Americas data center advisory, said.
“The risk has gone up significantly because it takes a lot more money to deploy to build these things now, and the scale is much bigger,” he said.
From Fifth Avenue to farmland
For decades, top brokers built careers mastering glamorous markets like Rodeo Drive retail, Manhattan office towers or coastal industrial hubs. Now, leading data center brokers are scouring cornfields, deserts and abandoned factories in search of land with enough power to keep massive data centers humming. That shift has pushed dealmaking into places like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Columbus, Ohio; Indiana; rural Pennsylvania; and farmland outside Chicago. Northern Virginia remains the world’s largest data center market, with regions around Dallas and Phoenix gaining steam. But those hubs are increasingly constrained by power shortages, land scarcity and community pushback.
The result is a scramble for sites that can support massive electrical loads. Data center brokers crisscross the country, frequently boarding flights to remote corners in search of the next site. Ten-megawatt deals, once considered large, have given way to projects measured in hundreds of megawatts, or even a half gigawatt or more.
Data centers are almost always pre-leased, and the scale can be enormous. One industry insider pegged a recent lease deal at $8 billion over a 20-year term. Long-term leases in the billions means correspondingly large commissions, though no one would reveal exact numbers. But lining up tenants is just one piece of the puzzle. Building the infrastructure to support an entire data center campus has become increasingly difficult over the past five years.
“It used to be a lot easier of an execution from the standpoint there was readily available land, most jurisdictions were rolling out the red carpet and excited and embracing the data center sector, and they were fast-tracking approvals,” Eastdil Secured’s Rob Walters said. He did 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 when you needed it.”
Unlike traditional asset classes, where senior rainmakers often dominate, data center brokerage is more spread out among dealmakers and has become a proving ground for younger producers, drawn by the sector’s growth. It’s drawing young talent from investment banking, engineering and construction. Many of the sector’s top brokers are under 50, insiders said.
But veteran data center brokers who have spent decades toiling in a once-unheralded corner of the industry caution that the learning curve is steep for young strivers, and evolving as fast as the sector itself.
“When I first got in business, it was pretty meat and potatoes,” said Saavedra, a 16-year industry veteran who started in the office sector before joining data center firm Digital Realty, then Colliers. “Now you have to be an energy specialist, you have to be a financial engineer, and with all the alternative energy people are looking at, you have to be really aware of that.”
A different kind of brokerage
Unlike office or retail deals, data center transactions hinge on a complex matrix of infrastructure variables like access to power and fiber, proximity to substations, floodplain risk, zoning and water for cooling.
Where data centers were once modest warehouses or racks of equipment, today they are sprawling campuses requiring careful coordination of land, power and financing. The market has consolidated around a handful of hyperscale customers, led by the “Magnificent Seven”: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. There’s also a limited cohort of investors. Blackstone, Brookfield and Macquarie are some of the biggest players.
At CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate firm, data centers have become a big contributor to revenue. On its most recent earnings call, CEO Robert Sulentic said the firm generated nearly $700 million from data centers in the third quarter of 2025, up 40 percent from a year earlier. Revenue from data center leasing doubled during that period, he said.
“All these other asset classes are so mature that you’re not having to find the land, get the power, make sure there’s water, raise the financing, raise the equity, build it, sell it.”
“We expect data centers to be around 10 percent of our earnings this year and more next year,” Sulentic said, calling the current surge “a big bump-up in activity” that the firm believes will extend through a multiyear cycle.
CBRE has data center brokers spread across the world, including in South Africa and the Middle East. Rival JLL has built a similarly deep bench, with more than 150 data center brokers globally and hundreds more professionals focused on engineering, project management and operations.
Brokerage is just one slice of the opportunity as companies are increasingly positioning themselves as full-service partners that handle the ongoing management of data centers. CBRE, for example, manages roughly 800 data centers globally and has rolled out a digital infrastructure services business that combines facility management with project improvement work inside operational data centers.
Eastdil shepherds clients through the entire lifecycle of a data center, which can make other kinds of brokerage look like child’s play.
“When you look at all these, other asset classes are so mature that you’re not having to find the land, get the power, make sure there’s water, raise the financing, raise the equity, build it, sell it,” said Mark Chu, Eastdil’s co-head of Asia. “With the clients now, it is helping them identify the land, purchase the land, finance it, find a tenant, finance the construction, and then, you know, ultimately, finish the building and then find a buyer or find a JV partner.”
The new oil fields
Every January, the data center-industrial complex descends on Honolulu for the Pacific Telecommunications Council conference, turning the city into a sun-splashed summit on servers, power and capital. Executives swap suits for Hawaiian shirts and puka shell necklaces, but the conversations over mai tais are anything but laid back.
The crowd has grown more varied by the year and now includes traditional real estate players convinced their land could be the next hyperscale site, utilities and energy company leaders suddenly aware their power infrastructure is gold and even oil and gas executives trekking in from Texas to see how they fit into the digital land rush. It’s not just bankers jockeying for deals anymore. The lawyers are there, too, chasing a piece of it. No one wants to be left off the island.
“Everyone is chasing the opportunity for sure,” one broker who attended the conference said.
The sector’s momentum shows no sign of slowing. Industry veterans say AI-driven demand is still in its early innings. Data centers are “the new oil fields” is a phrase that has gained traction across the industry during this hypergrowth, as new facilities spring up across the country. Data center construction officially surpassed traditional office building development for the first time in 2026.
But looking five years down the road, predicting the next phase of the market is tricky. The pace of technological innovation and the constant push for competitive advantage makes it difficult to know whether the focus will shift from building new centers to managing and optimizing existing ones, or whether the wave of construction will continue unabated.
“This stuff is just changing so quickly, and everyone’s looking for that advantage,” Saavedra said.
Community pushback against data centers is also growing, as residents worry about electricity costs, traffic and environmental impacts.
Back in Saline Township, where Dennis Wilkin made the deal for his land, opposition to Related Digital’s proposed 2.2 million-square-foot “Stargate” data center for OpenAI and Oracle is intensifying, even as preliminary work moves ahead.
Some residents are trying to stop the project, arguing that township officials were forced into the rezoning of roughly 575 acres of farmland, including Wilkin’s. Blue Owl Capital backed off from financing the project.
But the brokers keep going. It’s been good so far, and what’s the alternative?
“Certainly, if you’re not investing in it like we are, you’re gonna fall behind,” one broker said.