Digital Realty sets $27M/MW benchmark for AI data centers

Digital Realty just put a price tag on what institutional-grade AI infrastructure is worth. The data center giant paid $27 million per megawatt for three leased AI data centers, a figure that effectively sets a new valuation benchmark for stabilized AI infrastructure assets.

To put that number in context: recent lease valuations in competitive, high-power markets have ranged from $400,000 to $550,000 per megawatt. Lower-quality data center sites trade between $100,000 and $250,000 per megawatt. The $27 million per megawatt figure isn’t a lease rate. It’s an acquisition price, reflecting what a buyer is willing to pay for a fully operational, revenue-generating AI data center on a per-megawatt basis.

Why megawatts are the new metric that matters

Digital Realty, listed on the NYSE as DLR, operates over 300 data centers across more than 55 metropolitan areas on six continents. It’s the world’s largest cloud- and carrier-neutral data center REIT, which means it doesn’t play favorites with any single cloud provider.

The company signed over $1 billion in new leases in 2025, for the second consecutive year. Digital Realty also announced a partnership with NVIDIA in November 2025 to build an AI Factory Research Center. The company took home “AI Data Centre of the Year” at the 2024 Datacloud Global Awards.

The crypto connection: former miners take notes

The $27 million per megawatt benchmark directly impacts how investors evaluate companies transitioning from Bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure. Firms like Hut 8 and TeraWulf, which built their businesses around power-intensive Bitcoin mining, are increasingly being measured against traditional data center REITs like Digital Realty and Equinix. The comparison metric of choice is enterprise value per megawatt.

What this means for investors

The $27 million per megawatt price point confirms that AI infrastructure has entered a phase of premium asset pricing. These are stabilized, revenue-producing assets with existing tenants.

It creates a reference point for every other deal in the pipeline. Investment banks, private equity firms, and competing REITs now have a comp to point to when pricing AI data center transactions.

For crypto-native investors, this benchmark reshapes the valuation framework for companies straddling the line between mining and AI hosting. If a company like Hut 8 or TeraWulf controls hundreds of megawatts of power capacity and can demonstrate a credible path to AI-grade operations, the implied asset value based on DLR’s benchmark dwarfs their current market capitalizations.

Converting a mining facility into an enterprise-grade AI data center requires massive capital expenditure on cooling, networking, physical security, and compliance infrastructure, as well as multi-year contracts with creditworthy tenants that justify premium valuations.