Revolutionary Asset Class: Data Centers Sparked More Investment Than Ever in 2025

If 2024 was the year data centers gained everyone’s attention, then 2025 was when real estate’s biggest power players dove head-first into the asset class. 

For a piece of real estate that bridges the gap between industrial and outright science fiction, data centers have become among the most capital-intensive assets in American history, with deals for the smallest individual projects hitting $1 billion and the biggest campuses reaching tens of billions of dollars. Telecommunications towers they are not. 

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $14 trillion under its belt, formed AI Infrastructure Partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA, MGX (an Abu Dhabi-based fund) and Elon Musk’s xAI, and led the joint venture’s $40 billion purchase of Aligned Data Centers, a national data center provider with more than 50 assets and 50 gigawatts of power capacity.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) became the nation’s largest owner of data centers last year with 105 campuses to its name. (Meta is a distant second with 85 data centers.) These data centers powered AWS’s total income to grow 24 percent in 2025 to $35.6 billion. 

As for the loans across the data center space, well, they made the collective eyes of credit analysts pop. 

Jamie Dimon’s J.P. Morgan Chase led a $38 billion construction financing package for a pair of hyperscale data centers, while private credit got in on the action in a big way, as well. Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Property Trust in March 2025 worked with J.P Morgan to provide a $2 billion construction loan for a 100-acre data center facility in West Jordan, Utah, making it one of the largest construction loans issued in the last 12-plus months. 

Then there was Len O’Donnell’s Affinius Capital, which saw its data center pipeline reach $15 billion, as it utilized its subsidiary Corscale Data Centers, a vertically integrated data center development firm that specializes in execution, site acquisition and asset management. 

Previously unfamiliar faces also entered the space. Related Companies had been building solar power plants, but then big tech hyperscalers called and asked to buy that same power to aid their data center needs. Jeff Blau’s firm subsequently secured a deal to build a $16 billion data ‌center campus in Michigan for Larry Ellison’s Oracle, with Blackstone as an equity partner.  

And Dallas-based Lincoln Property Company, one of the nation’s largest commercial real estate owners, partnered just this April with data center infrastructure developer Metroblocks to build a 30-acre data center campus in the Kansas City, Mo., area. 

It seems everyone is invested in data centers, repercussions on the power grid and the water supply be damned.

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com.