Potential AI slowdown is not ‘end of the world’ for data center real estate, says Digital Realty CEO
- ID
- 24613
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 15 Sep 2026, 8:28 PM
- Fetched
- 15 Sep 2026, 9:26 PM
- Provider
- CNBC Technology
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/data-center-reit-ceo-ai-slowdown.html
- Source URL
- https://www.cnbc.com/id/19854910/device/rss/rss.html
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 15 Sep 2026, 9:27 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- saas_foundersai_ml_learners
What happened
Digital Realty CEO Andrew Power said recent slowdown pledges from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI do not mean 'pencils down' for AI or the data center real estate supporting it. JLL's Andrew Batson noted significant runway remains for adoption of current AI models. AI now accounts for roughly 70% of global data center capacity demand, per the article.
Why it matters
If AI accounts for ~70% of data center demand and adoption of current models still has runway, builders in Malaysia and SEA should expect data center capacity and cloud pricing to remain tight even if frontier model releases slow. Founders provisioning GPU or colocation should lock in capacity now rather than betting on near-term price relief.
Discussion angle
Does the 70% AI-driven data center demand figure change how Malaysian founders should think about cloud cost projections and whether to self-host versus use managed AI APIs?