Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, January 26th.

Today on Forbes, the AI Data Center Gold Rush is leaving the landlords behind.

Swollen with seemingly insatiable demand for computing power, the AI boom has birthed hundreds

of unicorns out of thin air, minted dozens of billionaires,

and alchemized more than a trillion dollars in market value for big public tech companies,

like Nvidia, Broadcom, Google, and Meta.

It's also inspired an infrastructure land grab, perhaps unprecedented in financial breadth. Earlier in January,

meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to build out tens of gigawatts of AI infrastructure this decade,

and, quote, hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. At $50 billion per gigawatt,

that will likely cost trillions. Boom time. At $50 billion per gigawatt, that will likely cost trillions. Boom times for AI infrastructure should mean banner years for the companies that have historically provided it,

data center real estate investment trusts or REITs. Yet three of the biggest, Equinix, with a $78 billion market cap,

Digital Realty with a $55 billion market cap, and Iron Mountain, with a $27 billion market

cap, aren't seeing them. Their share prices are down 13%, 11%, and 16% over the last year, respectively,

compared to the S&P 500's 17% increase.

These companies are the landlords for the internet.

They buy real estate, build data center shells with supporting infrastructure,

and lease the property to tech company tenants.

They should be killing it. They're not,

and it's likely because of a few things, lower appetite for risk, power constraints,

and lack of access to more and more speculative capital. Mark Giorelli, an analyst for Morningstar,

says that right now, the market believes that chips

from Google, Broadcom, Nvidia, and others, quote, will capture the economic profits of AI,

...