24 ARTICLES
CRE capital flows, fund raises, M&A, and financing events — read for what they signal about asset pricing and deployment.
Riot Platforms filed a Form 8-K on August 14 reporting that a project subsidiary closed a senior secured delayed-draw term loan of up to $573.0 million, with Morgan Stanley Senior Funding as administrative agent, to buy long-lead equipment for the 191 critical IT megawatt data center at its Rockdale campus. The loans mature December 31, 2026. The first megawatts are not due to energize until December 2027.
Fermi filed its second quarter Form 8-K on August 13 and furnished two exhibits describing the same move. A third party will finance, construct, own and operate roughly 2.6 GW of generation at Project Matador under a long-term ground sublease, and Fermi commits no capital and issues no debt for the plant. The power plant became a real estate instrument.
NVIDIA said on August 10 that it signed memorandums of understanding with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish independent compute financing platforms and mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital. Read the About sections of that same release and the CRE fact is already on the page: three of the six describe real estate as a core business, and one of them calls itself the world’s largest alternative asset manager.
Fermi Inc. said on August 10 that it executed its first binding customer lease at Project Matador in Carson County, Texas: 222 MW of total facility power to TensorWave, at approximately $6.5 billion of contracted revenue over an initial 15-year term. The wire then carried a corrected version of the same release. The sentence about a guarantee from one of the global leaders in AI is not in it.
Prologis agreed on August 4 to acquire SEGRO plc in a recommended share offer with a partial cash alternative, valuing SEGRO at approximately $18.8 billion. The press release sells European scale: 368 million square feet and a 126 percent larger European land bank. The Rule 2.7 announcement filed with the SEC names the thing scale does not describe, which is 2.5 GVA of power.
Hadrian said on August 6 that it raised $1.37 billion at a $7.87 billion valuation to build more highly automated factories, with JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group as anchor co-lead. The company puts its footprint at just under 3 million square feet across four sites. Its own earlier release shows that 2.2 million of that is a single repurposed railcar plant in rural Alabama.
Alpaca Real Estate said on August 6 that it held the final close of its debut fund at approximately $223 million, inclusive of roughly $21 million of co-investments, about 18 months after the first close. Public pensions, foundations and RIAs underwrote a first-time manager whose stated differentiator is a proprietary AI platform. The interesting number is not the fund size.
Brookfield Asset Management furnished its second quarter results to the SEC on August 6, reporting a record $77 billion raised in the quarter and more than $1 trillion of assets under management. Read the segment lines and the story changes. Real estate strategies took $4.3 billion of that, roughly 5.6 percent, while credit took $51 billion and AI infrastructure got a fund of its own.
Starwood Real Estate Income Trust told the SEC on August 4 that it closed a joint venture with Apollo the day before, taking a $1.02 billion investment for 41.5 percent of a vehicle holding roughly 120 of its affordable housing properties. The proceeds repay a credit facility. Read past the equity headline and the structure looks like something else.
Meta and BlackRock will co-develop a roughly $14 billion, 1 gigawatt data center campus in El Paso, with BlackRock funds owning 80 percent and Meta 20. Meta’s own quarterly filing adds the part the press release does not lead with: each lease runs an initial four-year term, and Meta backs the campus with residual value guarantees of approximately $13 billion.
The nation’s largest multifamily lender said on August 3 that it intends to deploy more than $750 billion through 2035 to increase housing supply and support homeownership, an increase of more than $200 billion over the prior decade. The pledge covers financing for 1,000,000 affordable units and 500,000 homebuyers. It also carries a condition most coverage will skip.
The Department of Energy said on July 29 that it selected Brookfield to lease land and develop a data center campus at its Paducah Site in western Kentucky, and selected NextEra Energy to build and own the power behind it. The partners put the privately funded investment above $100 billion, with up to 1.8 gigawatts of utility capacity and more than 1.2 gigawatts of compute. No tenant has been named.
Amazon reported second quarter results on July 30 and filed its Form 10-Q on July 31. Net sales were $200.6 billion, up 20 percent, and AWS grew 37 percent, its fastest in 18 quarters. The number that matters to real estate sits lower in the release: trailing twelve month free cash flow swung to an outflow of $7.6 billion, and Amazon attributes the swing to artificial intelligence.
On its July 29 earnings call, Microsoft told investors it is extending the estimated useful lives of its datacenters and office buildings from 15 years to 25 years, effective with fiscal 2027, and that more of its future datacenter leases will therefore shift from finance leases to operating leases. The reported capital expenditure number falls to about $175 billion. The commitment behind it does not.
CBRE reported second quarter revenue of $11.2 billion on July 29, up 15.5 percent, and raised its 2026 core EPS outlook to $7.80 to $7.90. Buried in the segment detail is the number that matters to operators: revenue from critical infrastructure services reached $676 million, up from $403 million a year earlier, and that one line added more new revenue in the quarter than global leasing did.
Brookfield said on July 22 that it agreed to acquire Aypa Power, the largest standalone battery storage developer in North America, from Blackstone Energy Transition Partners for roughly $7 billion enterprise value and $3 billion of equity. Aypa brings about 6.5 GW operating and contracted, 95 percent of it under contracts averaging 17 years, plus a pipeline above 20 GW. For real estate, the binding constraint on AI has moved from land to electrons.
Alphabet reported second-quarter results on July 22 and told investors it now expects to spend $195 billion to $205 billion on capital expenditures this year, up from $180 billion to $190 billion. Filed quarterly capex hit a record $44.9 billion, roughly double a year earlier, and free cash flow turned negative. Management says about 40 percent of the spend goes to data centers and networking. For real estate, that number is the demand floor under the entire data center thesis.
Travis Kalanick’s Atoms announced a $1.7 billion equity round on July 22, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the board and Bain Capital, Uber, and Fifth Wall participating. Fifth Wall’s check has been reported at $135 million, which would be the real estate fund’s largest single investment. The read that matters for CRE: physical AI treats real estate as its storage layer, and the tenants it creates are robots.
Hut 8 said on July 20 it signed a second 15-year lease at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, a 352 megawatt deal with a base-term contract value of $9.8 billion. The lease fully commercializes the one-gigawatt campus, doubling the tenant’s contracted capacity to 704 megawatts. For real estate, the detail that matters is the structure: a triple-net, take-or-pay lease to a single investment-grade tenant, energizing in 2027.
IREN Limited said on July 20 it signed $2.8 billion in new multi-year cloud contracts with leading AI developers, raising its 2026 AI Cloud run-rate revenue target above $4 billion. The detail that matters for real estate is how it is funded: customer prepayments covering roughly 45 percent of the associated GPU capital, on top of equipment-backed financing. The AI data center is being underwritten on contracted cash flow, not speculation.
ACS Group and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners launched Coravel on July 15, a 50-50 joint venture that turns their data center development platform into an operating brand with an initial 1.7 gigawatt portfolio and a signed long-term hyperscale lease at a Dallas-Fort Worth campus. For commercial real estate, it is another sign that the largest infrastructure capital pools are building the AI buildout as a real estate business.
TSMC used its record second quarter to commit another $100 billion to Arizona, lifting its total state investment to $265 billion across a planned ten fabs, two advanced packaging plants, and a research center. The expansion is driven by demand for AI chips, and for commercial real estate it concentrates one of the country’s largest advanced-manufacturing buildouts in a single Phoenix submarket.
Brookfield-backed Csquare priced its initial public offering at $21 a share, below its marketed $23 to $27 range, raising $1.05 billion rather than the $1.35 billion implied at the top end. The result does not erase demand for digital infrastructure. It does put a sharper public-market price on leverage, delivery, and the difference between a data center story and a data center cash flow.
Hines Global Income Trust paid about $151 million for a fully leased Class AA Austin tower and paired it with grocery-anchored retail in Chicago. The bid is back for one narrow profile of office. The discipline is knowing whether your asset fits it.
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