Developers Chase “Powered Land” as Next Frontier

Major developers are shifting from builders to power brokers as the artificial intelligence boom fuels a scramble for land wired for megawatts.

The surge in demand for digital infrastructure is spawning two new real estate niches — “quantum real estate,” for specialized computing facilities, and “powered land,” sites prepped with grid access and utility entitlements ready for data centers, CNBC’s Property Play reported.

Roughly 20,000 acres worldwide sit under operational data centers, but twice that amount — nearly 2 billion square feet — will be needed over the next five years to keep up with growth, according to research from Hines.

Hines, long a player in industrial and office development, has embraced securing power and entitlements for hyperscale sites.

“The challenge isn’t building walls anymore. It’s getting megawatts to the site,” said David Steinbach, the firm’s global chief investment officer.

The company is mapping grids, cutting deals with landowners and offering financial guarantees to utilities, all to make land “AI-ready” before shovels hit the ground.

That front-end work is quickly turning power access itself into an asset class. Once grid commitments are secured, the land becomes a tradable commodity, Steinbach said, attracting deep-pocketed hyperscalers and infrastructure funds.

“The smartest capital today isn’t chasing square footage — it’s enabling computation,” Steinbach added, citing Nvidia’s recent $5 billion chip partnership with Intel as proof that data infrastructure has become the “new oil.”

Private equity is taking note. In August, Silver Lake and Commonwealth Asset Management launched a $400 million powered land platform to assemble strategic sites across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. The firms aim to corner the market on what they call the “key scarce input” for AI-driven data center expansion.

For developers, that means chasing power as much as location. Data center growth is already pushing beyond Northern Virginia into power-rich markets like Texas and the Midwest, while Hines’ research flags Europe and the Middle East as emerging plays.

“This isn’t just a tech story,” Steinbach said. “It’s a building cycle story reshaping how and where the real estate business develops for decades to come.”

— Holden Walter-Warner