The New Power Brokers – Oct. 20, 2025
Data center development increasingly is tied to land that’s prepared and ready to support operations
CIM Group last week announced the formation of Westlands Electric Power Company (WEPCO), a power company comprised of CIM-affiliated entities that initially own renewable power projects located in California. WEPCO’s ownership of existing, operating power projects, projects approved for development and power storage seeks to create the foundation for a scalable operating enterprise. The long-term plan calls for the development, acquisition and operation of additional power projects located in qualified rural Opportunity Zones across the U.S.
Although owning infrastructure isn’t a new endeavor for CIM, which has an 11-year track record of building and operating clean power projects, the announcement dovetails with a burgeoning trend of real estate companies getting into the power business. In an article titled “Major real estate developers are fast becoming power brokers,” CNBC’s Diana Olick reported on two new sectors emerging from the ravenous global demand for data: so-called quantum real estate, or structures designed to house specialized quantum computers; and powered land, i.e., land prepared and ready for data center operations, with a focus on obtaining a reliable and sufficient power supply.
“That land would have to be secured with the permits, utility commitments and infrastructure needed to deliver power to a data center,” Olick wrote.
Currently, there are about 20,000 acres of powered land around the world. Roughly twice that acreage, or nearly two billion square feet, will be needed to support current projections for data center growth over the next five years, Olick wrote, citing new research from Hines. Forty thousand acres is equivalent to just under the size of three Manhattans or about 1.5 times the area of Paris.
Hines did this research in part because it too is getting into the power business. The company is now securing power and entitlements for hyperscale sites. That entails mapping grids, negotiating with landowners and providing financial guarantees to grid operators, wrote Olick.
“The challenge isn’t building walls anymore. It’s getting megawatts to the site,” David Steinbach, Hines’ global CIO, told Olick. “Hines is focused on this front-end work, making land AI-ready before the buildings even rise.”
Steinbach said powered land has become its own investable asset class, because power rights themselves are scarce and valuable. Once grid connections and permits are secured, the result is a tradeable asset with clear demand from hyperscalers and operators, he said.
In August, a partnership of Silver Lake and Commonwealth Asset Management announced the launch of a digital infrastructure platform with $400 million of capital to assemble a global portfolio of strategically located powered land sites. “Data centers are a critical infrastructure in modern society and with the immense growth of AI and cloud computing, the ability to deploy large-scale data centers rapidly with secure, scalable power is crucial,” Commonwealth principal Adam Fisher said at the time. Silver Lake and Commonwealth cited a Goldman Sachs forecast that AI could drive a 165% increase in data center power demand by 2030.
Although the competition for powered land is being led more by tech companies and energy producers than real estate developers, Hines doesn’t want to be left behind, Olick wrote. The company’s research projected that in the long term, development of data centers will need to look beyond already-crowded hubs such as Northern Virginia and into power-rich areas of the U.S. such as the Midwest and Texas, along with global regions in which a relative paucity of supply creates opportunity for developers and investors.
″The smartest capital today isn’t chasing square footage — it’s enabling computation,” Steinbach told Olick. He cited the recent Nvidia deal with Intel to co-develop chips for data centers and personal computers. “Nvidia’s $5-billion bet on Intel isn’t just a chip deal; it’s a seismic signal that AI infrastructure is the new oil.”