Digital Realty Q3 2026: Bookings Triple to a Record $627M

On October 29, 2026, Digital Realty Trust, Inc. furnished its third-quarter results on a Form 8-K, and it filed its Form 10-Q the next day. Revenue was $1.902 billion, 21 percent above the year-ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $978 million, up 13 percent, and Core FFO excluding net promote was $2.10 per share, compared with $1.89. The company reported record bookings of $855 million of annualized GAAP base rent at 100 percent share and $627 million at its own share, which computes to about three times the $208 million at its share reported for the second quarter. Backlog of signed leases that have not commenced reached a record $2.5 billion at 100 percent share and $1.8 billion at its share. These are company figures, and bookings and backlog are company-defined measures.

The company raised its 2026 Core FFO per share outlook, excluding net promote, to $8.30 to $8.35, from $8.15 to $8.20 in July. Total revenue guidance excluding promote income moved to $7.050 billion to $7.125 billion and adjusted EBITDA guidance to $3.800 billion to $3.850 billion. During the quarter it acquired $742 million of land, including sites near Indianapolis to support over one gigawatt of IT capacity, two Chicago-area parcels totaling 360 megawatts, and Charlotte-area land for up to 600 megawatts. After quarter end it closed $1.4 billion of initial cornerstone equity commitments for a new perpetual capital strategy focused on stabilized North American hyperscale data centers, and it raised its Teraco stake from 61 percent to about 77 percent for about $688 million, mostly in stock.

The bookings record is concentrated in long, large leases, and the filings do not tie it to AI by number. Leases above one megawatt were $474 million of the total at Digital Realty’s share, with a weighted average term of 17.9 years, against 5.5 years for deployments of up to one megawatt. Asia Pacific carried $261 million of that large-deployment rent, which computes to 55 percent, ahead of the Americas at $203 million. The earnings deck says the company develops large capacity blocks for “cloud and AI providers,” and the customer table lists a “Leading AI Chip Maker” at $82 million of annualized recurring revenue, or 1.6 percent. Neither document gives an AI share of bookings or backlog. Oracle is the second-largest customer at $518 million, or 9.9 percent, with 10.6 years of remaining term. The two largest customers account for about 11 percent and 10 percent of total revenue, according to the 10-Q.

The guidance table separates growth in revenue from growth in cash earnings. By PSV arithmetic, the midpoint of revenue guidance rose $187.5 million since July while the midpoint of adjusted EBITDA guidance rose $25 million, and the company does not attribute the gap in the table. One visible contributor is power: utility reimbursements from tenants rose $91.2 million from a year earlier to $423.9 million, which computes to 28 percent of the quarter’s $325.2 million revenue increase. Utilities expense rose 27.1 percent to $477.5 million, and the 10-Q cites higher power pricing, mainly in EMEA and Asia Pacific, and more consumption at newly completed sites. PSV’s read is that revenue overstates the economic gain when a growing part of it passes through a power bill. That is PSV analysis, not a company statement.

An owner or lender benchmarking against this report should build a one-page comparison from the filed supplement, not the headline. Inputs: the leasing summary, the lease expiration schedule, the development lifecycle table, the occupancy table and the outlook table, each saved with its filing date. Output: rent per kilowatt, term and renewal spread split by deployment size and region, with every figure linked to its table. The split changes the answer. Cash renewal spreads were 26.3 percent on deployments above one megawatt, from $125 to $158 per kilowatt per month, and 4.7 percent on smaller ones, so the blended 11.8 percent describes neither. An analyst reviews the extraction, and an asset manager approves any use of those figures in a rent assumption.

A second run belongs on the development table. Digital Realty lists 1,464 megawatts under construction at 63 percent leased, with $22.0 billion of total expected investment at 100 percent share and an 11.6 percent average expected stabilized yield, which is a company estimate. The market lines differ widely: Northern Virginia is 390 megawatts at 85 percent leased, Charlotte 212 at 94 percent, Atlanta 192 with none leased and first-quarter 2029 completion, and EMEA 211 at 12 percent. A developer’s team should compare its own pre-leasing and delivery dates to the matching market line, then flag each entitlement separately. Charlotte is the test case: PSV reported on October 27 that the city paused new data center applications through October 18, 2027. The filing says “Charlotte metro area” and does not name a jurisdiction, so counsel must confirm which approvals apply before anyone reads across.