Riot spent years turning cheap electricity into Bitcoin. Now the same land, substations and cooling know-how are being repackaged for AI - a pivot that could make the power connection more valuable than the mine.
The company you have probably never heard of owns the buildings your favorite apps actually live in. Here is how a REIT born from bankruptcy auctions became the landlord of the AI boom.
A Louisiana telephone descendant is wagering that the most valuable layer of AI may be the glass beneath it. Lumen is turning a sprawling fiber backbone into a programmable network enterprises can switch on in minutes.
Younity is a New York and Tel Aviv based proptech company that builds a software-defined digital infrastructure platform for multifamily and commercial buildings. It delivers property-wide, instantly provisioned WiFi paired with a SaaS layer for building performance monitoring, cyber protection, proactive service and an open platform for smart-building integrations. Younity helps landlords, developers and asset managers turn connectivity from a cost center into a revenue source while giving tenants lightning-fast, secure internet from move-in.
Equinix is a global digital infrastructure company that designs, builds and operates carrier-neutral colocation data centers - its International Business Exchange (IBX) centers - where enterprises, cloud providers, networks and financial institutions place equipment and interconnect directly with one another. Founded in 1998 on the principle of neutrality, Equinix has grown into the world's largest data center and interconnection platform, operating a programmable network of more than 270 data centers across roughly 75+ markets in 30+ countries. Structured as a real estate investment trust (REIT) since 2015, the company pairs physical colocation with software-defined services such as Equinix Fabric, Metal and Network Edge, positioning itself as the meeting place for hybrid multicloud and, increasingly, distributed AI workloads.
Evocative is a Los Angeles-based digital infrastructure provider that delivers enterprise-grade colocation, bare metal servers, carrier-neutral network, and managed services. Built largely through acquisition, its footprint spans roughly 20 data centers and dozens of Points of Presence across strategically located North American, European, and Asian metros. Evocative positions itself as a carrier-neutral, edge-ready alternative to the largest colocation operators, giving enterprises and service providers full control over performance, connectivity, and scaling for workloads that increasingly include AI.
Ingenium is an independent engineering, consulting and operations firm specializing in mission-critical data centers across Latin America. Founded in Costa Rica in 2008, it acts as a vendor-agnostic trusted advisor that plans, designs, builds, certifies and operates high-availability digital infrastructure. The firm has worked on more than 150 data center projects in over 20 countries and holds one of the region's largest rosters of engineers accredited by the Uptime Institute, BICSI, LEED, PMI and ISO - including work on Latin America's first Tier IV design certification.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) is an infrastructure developer and holding company that builds and operates businesses reshaping how energy and digital systems work together. Founded inside Alphabet in 2017 and spun out as independent in 2019 by Sidewalk Labs veterans Jonathan Winer and Brian Barlow, SIP raised $400 million in 2020 backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. It identifies bottlenecks in physical infrastructure, then pairs technology with capital to create new operating companies - most recently Renew Home, a roughly one-gigawatt residential virtual power plant, and Verrus, which designs large-scale data centers that flex their grid draw on demand.