Prologis, GIC Form $1.6B Industrial Build-to-Suit Joint Venture
More than 60 percent of Prologis’ construction starts last year were build-to-suit projects
By Nick Trombola March 19, 2026 11:43 am
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The world’s largest owner of industrial space and one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds have, unsurprisingly, joined forces.
San Francisco-based Prologis and Singapore’s GIC have formed a $1.6 billion joint venture targeting build-to-suit logistics developments across the U.S. The JV includes an existing portfolio of 4 million square feet, with undefined “additional capacity” available for future expansion, according to the firms.
“With strong e-commerce growth, the re-shoring of supply chains and resilient consumer spending, industrial remains a strong long-term investment theme in North America,” Goh Chin Kiong, GIC’s chief investment officer of real estate, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Prologis, a best-in-class operator, reflects our shared conviction in the sector and like-minded approach to deploying capital with discipline across cycles.”
Build-to-suit is among the strongest industrial subclasses due to increasingly crucial tenant priorities regarding location and capability, particularly among high-tech industries such as e-commerce, data centers and aerospace. The subclass has become an increasingly larger part of Prologis’ $230 billion platform as a result. The firm started $3.1 billion in industrial projects last year, and more than 60 percent of them are build-to-suit, per Prologis.
“Build-to-suit activity continues to be one of the clearest signals of customer conviction across our business,” Daniel Letter, Prologis’ CEO, said in a statement. “This joint venture with GIC builds on that momentum by pairing our platform and development expertise with a partner that shares our long-term perspective.”
More than 354 million square feet of industrial space was under construction in the U.S. at the start of this year, representing nearly 2 percent of the nation’s entire existing stock, according to a recent report by CommercialSearch. Much of that activity is driven by data center development, particularly in Texas and in Greater Washington, D.C. Indeed, the latter’s industrial development pipeline has more than doubled within the past year alone, to some 13.2 million square feet, and the D.C. region’s projected inventory expansion is tied with Austin, Texas, for largest in the country.
Prologis is, naturally, no stranger to the data center world. The firm inked 228 million square feet of new lease deals last year — its highest volume ever — and grew its data center capacity to 5.7 gigawatts, with another 14,000 acres of land banked for data center-related development, according to its latest earnings report.
Commercial Observer recently sat down with Damon Austin, Prologis’ newly minted chief development officer, to discuss the firm’s data center ecosystem and its challenges as AI advances explode across the globe.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
