Digital Realty to buy Blackstone's stake in Northern Virginia data centers for $7.8 billion

In June 2026, data center operator Digital Realty agreed to buy a controlling stake from investment firm Blackstone in three fully leased data centers in Northern Virginia, a region often called the physical heart of the internet. The deal values the assets at $7.8 billion.

What's in the deal

Digital Realty is buying a majority stake from Blackstone in three data centers that are already 100% occupied by tenants. In other words, this isn't a construction site betting on future demand but an up-and-running, revenue-generating business. All three facilities are in Northern Virginia.

• Deal value: $7.8 billion
• All three data centers are fully leased
• Seller: investment firm Blackstone; buyer: publicly traded REIT Digital Realty
• Location: Northern Virginia, the world's largest concentration of data centers

Why is Northern Virginia at the center of the deal?

Northern Virginia has long been described as the place "where the internet physically lives": a huge share of global internet traffic passes through the region, and its data center density is higher than anywhere else on the planet. That's why, as The Next Web notes, billion-dollar deals here have become almost routine. Sums that would have looked extraordinary not long ago now regularly show up in industry headlines.

Data centers as an investment

Digital Realty is one of the world's largest publicly traded data center operators. It's structured as a REIT, a real estate investment trust required to distribute most of its profits to shareholders. For a company like this, buying already-leased facilities is a way to grow its portfolio without the risks of construction or hunting for tenants from scratch: income from existing contracts is already locked in.

Blackstone, one of the world's largest alternative asset managers, has spent years building up its bets on digital infrastructure, from data centers to cable networks, treating it as a defensive asset with predictable cash flow. Selling a controlling stake in three facilities to Digital Realty fits the logic of taking profits while market appetite for these assets is at its peak.

Why are data centers in such demand right now?

Northern Virginia spent decades building up its concentration of data centers thanks to cheap land, a dense fiber-optic backbone, and relatively affordable electricity. But those same factors, especially access to power capacity and ready-made connectivity infrastructure, have become scarce as demand for compute has exploded. New data centers wait years in line to connect to the power grid, so facilities that are already operating, fully powered, and leased command a premium. That's one reason investors are willing to pay billions for ready-to-go sites rather than for the right to build new ones.

The bigger picture: demand for AI infrastructure

The growing number of data center deals like this one coincides with a boom in demand for compute to train and run large language models. Cloud providers and AI companies are leasing server space years in advance. Investors like Blackstone often enter the market before the infrastructure is even finished, then sell the revenue-generating facilities to strategic operators like Digital Realty. For those operators, each major deal expands their portfolio of pre-contracted capacity, an asset that, with supply this tight, gains value almost automatically, without additional capital spending on construction.

What it means

The $7.8 billion deal is one more sign of how quickly the physical infrastructure behind cloud and AI services is getting more expensive: investors are competing ever harder for finished data centers with guaranteed leases rather than building new facilities from scratch.