DigitalBridge at Goldman Sachs Conference: Navigating Digital Infrastructure

On Thursday, 11 September 2025, DigitalBridge Group Inc. (NYSE:DBRG) presented at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, offering a strategic overview of the digital infrastructure landscape. CEO Marc Ganzi highlighted both opportunities and challenges, focusing on capital deployment and power needs. The company aims to leverage its vast power bank and diverse portfolio amidst evolving market dynamics.

Key Takeaways

• DigitalBridge is capitalizing on increased demand in tower leasing and fiber infrastructure.
• The company is addressing a power gap in the U.S. with innovative grid-independent solutions.
• DigitalBridge targets significant growth from AI inferencing and data center expansion.
• The firm is investing heavily in CapEx, with a focus on co-investment and fee-related earnings.
• Challenges include aging transmission infrastructure and the need for substantial new power capacity.

Operational Updates

During the conference, Marc Ganzi emphasized the resurgence in tower leasing demand, the strongest since 2013. Mobile data traffic is projected to increase significantly, driven by AI inferencing, with the number of connected devices expected to double by 2033. Vertical Bridge, a subsidiary of DigitalBridge, plans to deliver 1,000 towers this year, up from 800 last year. The fiber business is segmented into residential and commercial categories, with investments in companies like Wide Open West and the successful turnaround of Zayo, which has achieved double-digit organic growth.

Data Centers and Power

Ganzi detailed the power needs of the data center industry, which currently consumes 68 gigawatts and is projected to reach 196 gigawatts. DigitalBridge is proactively addressing the power gap by building grid-independent solutions, including microgrids. The company boasts a 22-gigawatt power bank and spends approximately $10 million to $12 million per megawatt of data center capacity. With a target of 2x MOIC on equity raised for these projects, DigitalBridge differentiates itself by having power readily available.

Financial and Strategic Outlook

Financially, DigitalBridge is focused on increasing fee-related earnings and co-investment margins. The company is deploying $50 billion in CapEx and aims for a 40% margin on a run rate basis by the end of the year. Recent equity raises include $1.6 billion at Vantage Asia, $1.7 billion in Lancaster, and $1.6 billion for Yonder. Ganzi highlighted the importance of leveraging 60% debt and 40% equity to finance projects, emphasizing the direct flow-through of AI-driven growth to earnings.

Q&A Highlights

In the Q&A session, Ganzi reiterated the early stages of power demand for AI inferencing and the need for 60-80 gigawatts of new nuclear power by 2033-2035. He also pointed out the major challenge posed by aging transmission infrastructure, which requires long-term solutions beyond current political administrations.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of DigitalBridge’s strategy and insights shared during the conference.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference:

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Day 4 of the Goldman Sachs Communicopia and Technology Conference. I have the privilege of introducing Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge Group Inc. My name is Josh France, and I cover telecom and communications infrastructure here at Goldman. Thanks for being here this morning.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: Thanks, Josh. Good to be here.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Marc, you’ve been in this industry as long as anyone, and your portfolio companies touch basically the whole set of infrastructure globally. I would imagine you have a pretty good view of what’s happening on the ground. We’ll go into each of the different subsegments in a bit. From your vantage point and looking out over the next 10 years, how do you see the whole stack of infrastructure evolving? What do fiber networks look like? What do wireless and tower networks look like? How does AI change how the data center market looks?

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: I think, look, the ecosystem has never been more challenged. I think we have 57 companies around the world that go out and compete for business every day. This will be far and away the biggest year in terms of CapEx deployment across our ecosystem. As the year has gone on, those numbers have crept up, Josh, as we’ve gotten more bookings, more orders for towers, more orders for redundant dark fiber routes. We’ll get to data centers. We’ll save the best for last. We’re sort of drinking through a fire hose. To do that requires enormous coordination. It requires a lot of supervision. I would say there are two things that you can’t live without right now. One is capital, and one is power.

That unique combination of being able to raise capital and deploy it in an efficient way, and at the same time be able to hopefully predict where you’re going to need power, and then ultimately either procuring that power or, as we’ve talked about in our last quarterly conference call, where we’re building that power ourselves. We call that sort of digital power, grid-independent solutions. Some people call it behind the meter, in front of the meter. I don’t know where it is on the meter. Ultimately, you do connect to the meter at some point. I spend most of my time today. Someone asked me yesterday, like, how am I spending my time? I say I’m probably spending 50% of my time on power. I’m spending 40% of my time on raising capital.

The other 10% of the time, I got to run the business, which means I need another, I need a sort of a clone of me to do that part. It is important, though. I’m not sort of making light of it. There’s a lot to do. I think the ability to triage between what’s real and what’s not real is really important right now because we get a lot of customer inquiries across all the verticals, right? Mobile infrastructure, fiber infrastructure, and data center infrastructure. Part of our job is also, Josh, discerning which customers are real because you have a lot of window shopping, right? You have customers saying, oh, I really like that location because you’ve got that power. That sort of that moment of liking a location to ultimately signing a lease, that takes about nine months, right?

We invest a lot of time and energy with our customers. At the same time, those conversations for sites aren’t just a singular site conversation. There are multiple customers looking at the same sites, and we have to make decisions. Now, thankfully, we’ve got a power bank of 22 gigawatts, which allows us to be somewhat discerning and pick who we want to use. At that same time, you’ve got a bunch of other implications, which is, how do you keep buying land? How do you keep identifying power? How do you pick the right sites to build the power at? There’s just a lot going on there. I’ll come back to fiber in a second. On the tower side, AI is absolutely impacting towers, and it’s impacting the demand for towers.

I think if you listen very carefully to the subtext of SBA, Crown, and American, and then when Vertical Bridge talks publicly, the leasing demand that we’re seeing in towers today is probably the best leasing we’ve seen since 2013. Unpack that a little bit, what gives us this optimism around tower infrastructure, mobile infrastructure. There are three things happening in mobility today that I think require careful thought. One is mobile data traffic is up materially. If you were listening in the second quarter to what Jensen said and what Masa said in the first quarter, mobile data traffic will move up somewhere between 3x and 5x. I think that’s interesting because the last time we saw a really big step function in mobile data traffic was when the public cloud came to mobile devices and we were starting to put active compute, which is applications, on devices.

You saw mobile data traffic from 2010 to 2016 go up 10x. What you also saw at that same time period was a massive investment in network infrastructure.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Right.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: It was the last time you really saw the tower companies growing at double-digit organic growth. We’re seeing that same type of cycle occur again, except instead of, you know, sort of cloud-based applications, we’re seeing inferencing. As AI moves from LLMs to generative AI to inferencing, where do we think inferencing happens? It happens here. You know, 80% of AI is going to happen in a mobile environment. I’m not saying that 80% is all here on a mobile device. What I would offer to people listening today is that we’re at 30 billion connected wireless devices today. By 2033, we go to 60 billion wireless devices. Now, what’s a wireless device? It could be a wireless meter reading. It could be your fitness band. It could be a mobile device. It could be a phone. It could be a car. Think about all the connections that are happening.

Then compound that in an environment where 90% of those connections are machine-to-machine. The fastest growing area of data consumption in AI is not enterprise. It’s not data sovereignty. It’s not consumer. It’s machine-to-machine learning. That’s where you’re going to see most of the activity. All of that machine-to-machine activity is going to happen. Predominantly, 90% will be wireless. Look at a factory. If you go to a General Motors factory today, how many wireless devices, how many wireless sensors are along that production line at GM? If you go to their Lansing production plant, which we actually had a very interesting deployment by Extenet there, which is one of our mobile infrastructure companies, where we’re doing private 5G networks for GM, along that production line, they have over 300 different wireless devices communicating to each other without a human being involved.

That requires a node or an antenna or some form of connection. All of that is running in a private 5G environment. This is just one example of machine-to-machine connectivity and how wireless is being used to proliferate that activity. I’m pretty bullish on mobile infrastructure right now. One is machine-to-machine connectivity that’s driving that growth. Two is inferencing to the wireless device. The three thing you probably picked your head up this week is you saw satellite spectrum being bought by wireless companies. Why? We don’t have spectrum. The SEC doesn’t have a plan to issue new spectrum right now. What are the carriers doing? They’re looking at what’s available, which is the SAT spectrum. That introduction of spectrum and inferencing and the amount of devices that are coming online, 30 billion new devices, what are we going to do? What we do is we build infill.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yep.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: The carriers hate it when you say densification. We’ll call it infill for the time being. The reality is what you did see in this quarter from all of the tower companies is that it wasn’t amendment traffic that was leading leasing, it was colos. Colos are back. For the first time since 2013, at least in our private business, we saw de novo colo applications and de novo leases, which are colos, outpace amendments. That’s important because, as you know, a colo today is anywhere from $2,000 to $2,500 a month. An amendment is on average between $250 and $500 a month. You have to do five amendments to equal one colo. I’d rather do one colo than five amendments, right?

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Yep.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: At the same time, new construction is way up. Our domestic U.S. REIT, Vertical Bridge, has a pipeline of about 5,000 built-to-suit towers. Last year, we delivered about 800 towers. This year, we’ll deliver 1,000. Last year, American Crown and SBA combined delivered 180 towers. Our private little tower company is delivering 4x more BTS than the publicized. We’re pretty bullish about what’s happening in towers. I think towers are going to come back in a material way. I think if interest rates get cut, guess what happens to tower stocks? It’s pretty easy to figure it out. It’s not just at Vertical Bridge. We own 10 other tower companies around the world, in Asia, in Europe, and in Latin America. We’re seeing this across all of our tower businesses. We’re seeing a surge in demand. That’s kind of the first category.

Across Extenet, Boingo, and Freshwave, we own three small cell providers. Freshwave serves the UK. Boingo serves Wi-Fi and private networking. Extenet serves the carriers. All three of those companies are recording a massive uptick in their pipelines and bookings. I think mobile infrastructure, which generally has been falling out of favor because of what’s happening in data center land, if investors are paying attention, they’ll see that towers and small cell infrastructure is a good place to go right now. Fiber, it’s been a great year for fiber so far. We look at fiber potentially from a different prism than the rest of other people do. I think the fiber business today is four different businesses. I think you have to decide where you’re going to put your capital. We think there’s two businesses that focus on resi and two businesses that focus on commercial.

On the residential side, consumer-facing businesses where we are connecting homes, those businesses are businesses we’re investing in. We announced an investment in Wide Open West. We’re going to put a bunch of capital in that business. We’re going to refresh the network. We’re going to groom the network and give it the necessary capital to go grow it. We’re excited to close that, work with Crestview on that. We were opportunistic. We bought it at the right price. We like it when we can buy a business as a percentage of replacement cost. That’s how we think about it. I’m constantly thinking about what am I buying that business per home pass, per home connection, and then per route mile. Those are sort of three metrics we look at in resi fiber. At the beginning of the year, we bought an MDU business.

That’s the second vertical inside the fiber business. An MDU business is where you’re a wholesale provider. There, you know, we have a business called FiberNow that operates in the Southeast U.S. All we do is supply internet and cable service to multi-dwelling units. High-rise condos, HOAs, planned communities, we enter into a 10-year contract with that HOA. We provide the internet service, the broadband connectivity to those communities. What I like about that business, you probably saw Brookfield bought Hotwire, which was at like a 40 times multiple, which was fantastic. We get excited about those multiples when Brookfield pays that. What I think Hotwire, what Brookfield saw in Hotwire is they saw thousands of communities where they had a 10-year exclusive.

When you light up a community or you light up a high-rise building, you have 100% penetration day one because the broadband fee is included in the HOA fee. If you’re in a Hotwire building, you don’t have a choice. You have Hotwire. You literally plug in your router and you’re active. The same thing in FiberNow, which is the sort of challenger brand to Hotwire in the Southeast. We bought a really good business called OpticalTel, put a bunch of capital in, refreshed the management, put some growth CapEx in, and now we’re growing that business and competing in the MDU space. We also do that down in Latin America. We’ve got a business called Mundo Pacifico that also provides wholesale broadband fiber for the carriers and for MDUs. It’s a good space.

It’s a space I think that telcos value because it’s really hard to run around and sign up those HOAs. What I think you’re seeing in the multiple differentiation, you see a business like WOW trading for five times, then you see a business like Hotwire trading for 40 times. You say that’s 35 turns of value. What am I missing? I think it’s not what you’re missing. People believe that Hotwire and FiberNow have long-term contracts, and you don’t have to run around signing up the homes. You get that 100% penetration day one. On the wholesale, on the commercial side of fiber, we have Zayo performing really well for us. It’s been a great turnaround story. You know, we sat here five years ago at this conference and said there’s five things we got to do to fix Zayo when we took it private.

We’ve now completed all five of those things.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Right.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: Now the next phase is how do we keep that double-digit organic growth going at Zayo? It took a long time to get the sales engine going and get the growth going. Really, today, Zayo is the tale of two cities, right? It’s two businesses. One is an enterprise business. We’re connected to close to 60,000 buildings. We’re excited to close Crown and integrate all those buildings. The other side of the business is our wholesale transport business. That’s a great business. Our average contract there is over 20 years in duration. That’s really our long-haul network, our transport network, sub-oceanic cables, our metro rings, and the laterals that connect data centers, and the laterals that connect small cells and towers. That business, really good business, greater than 80% investment grade, long-term contracts. That’s infrastructure.

I think, if you’re thinking about fiber in the commercial sense, you really need to think about how you divide it. On the enterprise side, we compete with Cogent. On the long-haul transport side, we compete against Level 3, which is embedded inside of Lumen. We really like that long-haul transport business. If I could sort of, if you had to rank fiber from sort of one to four, I would go, that business, which is transport, I would take residential MDU, then I would go enterprise fiber in a commercial sense, and then I’d go commercial residential fiber. That’s how I rank those. Look, we’re invested across all four. We think broadband connectivity and providing those capillaries that connect data centers and towers and small cells is still a great business. We’ll see how the rest of the year turns out for Zayo.

That’s mobile infrastructure, that’s broadband infrastructure, and that leaves the last 20 minutes for what you really want to talk about, which is data centers.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Sure. Before we get there, the one thing that I think investors in DigitalBridge stock kind of think about is you have this strategic vision. You have the underlying trends that you talked about and all these different subsegments. When does AI work at the portfolio level, and when does that manifest into DigitalBridge’s earnings?

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: I think the direct flow-through for the DigitalBridge investors is a really simple algorithm, which is we said in our last earnings deck, which is for every megawatt that we’re lighting and building, we’re on average spending about $10 million per megawatt. I would say those costs have crept up into $11 to $12 million per megawatt. The way we think about that is, God bless you, the way we think about that is in a normalized world, we’re generally spotting 60% leverage and 40% equity. If I take that $10 million, I’ve got to go raise $4 million of equity to go build that one megawatt of power.

Historically, over the last 12 years since the inception of DigitalBridge, if you look at our realizations in data centers, whether it was DataBank or Vantage or any of the $9 billion of DPI we’ve returned to investors, we’re generally returning that capital north of a 2x MOIC. Why is 2x MOIC important? 2x MOIC is important because every dollar I raise, I generally have a performance hurdle around that two-point MOIC range. If I’m raising $4 million of equity capital to build one megawatt, what’s really interesting about that is I can turn that $4 million of equity into at least $8 million. If I turn it into $8 million on that $4 million, what’s really interesting is we’re earning a 20% performance fee on that $4 million of profit that we create.

That sets up really nicely because if you’re really thinking about that $4 million of profit, that’s $800,000 of carry that’s being generated back to DigitalBridge. That’s the flow-through, right? Ultimately, if you looked at our last earnings deck, 28% of our carry goes to our public shareholders. We send that back to our shareholders. We think it’s really interesting because our portfolio has been growing. We highlighted that we’ll be close to 6 gigawatts of capacity shortly. We’ve got a power bank of 22 gigawatts. We’ll lease through that 22 gigawatts in the next three years. That’s 22 gigawatts, which is 2,200 megawatts. If you start running the carry math on that, what’s happening at DigitalBridge is we’re accruing a massive amount of carry.

On that $40 billion of equity we raised that’s going to work for our investors, what’s the missing link in the DigitalBridge story for investors of going from a $12 share price back to $23 is fully valuing the embedded nature of what’s in the portfolio. We have to go out and make that argument. We have to sort of spoon-feed it. We got to show investors what we’re doing. At the same time, right now we’re deploying $50 billion of CapEx. It’s the most amount of CapEx we’ve ever deployed. We announced this morning we raised another $1.6 billion of equity at Vantage Asia. We announced a couple of weeks ago a huge project we’re doing in Lancaster. We raised, you know, effectively another $1.7 billion of equity. We announced a couple of months ago Yonder, where we raised $1.6 billion of co-invest on top of our fund commitment.

We keep raising equity. We keep putting it to work. Most importantly, when you put capital to work, we’re tethering it to a lease, which is a megawatt. The faster that investors can correlate that one megawatt to whether it’s Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Google, Meta, whoever it is, CoreWeave, NVIDIA, you know, we do business with the top 12 hyperscalers in the world. Just on a sheer volume, if you took all 10 of our portfolio companies, that 22 gigawatts, just look at the power bank of Digital Realty and Equinix, right? Equinix is at about 6 gigawatts, DLR is at 8. We’re at 22. Fourteen gigawatts with the two biggest digital REITs in the world that own data centers against our 22. We think we’re playing at scale. We’ve had this plan in place for eight years. It’s all starting to manifest itself now.

We find ourselves in a really lucky position because, as you know, people are struggling for power.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Right.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: People are struggling for real estate. We’re sitting back saying, look, we don’t come to the fight with one company. I don’t just own QTS, right? I own 10 QTSs. I’m fighting the fights locally. Further to that, we’re also saying one data center company doesn’t address the opportunity. You have to have an edge business. You have to have a hyperscale business. You cannot go to sleep on private cloud, as we’ve shown with Switch. What we’ve done with Switch in the last two and a half years has been incredible. We’re segmenting the market by geography, by workload. We’re showing up with a lot of capital, a lot of capabilities, and a lot of power. We’re doing it in a way that nobody else is doing it yet. The market’s starting to appreciate it. It’ll appreciate it when we start returning capital.

We turn those megawatts into carried interest, and then that turns into EPS. That’s our architecture. Maybe it requires a little patience because we’ve been building this for eight years. I think the real sort of, you know, this year it’s starting to turn for us. You’re seeing it in our earnings. We’ve had three very consistent quarters where we beat our FRE metrics. We plan to do that for the rest of the year. We plan to do it next year. Ultimately, the metric that we’re going to be measured by is really two things. One, our fee-related earnings. As we raise capital like we did today for Vantage Asia, like we did for Vantage North America and for Yonder, investors are looking at, OK, I like the carry. I got to wait four or five years to get to the carry.

What’s going to feed me in the time being? FRE, fee-related earnings. When we do raise that capital and we put that capital to work, it has a fee associated to it. We get fee and we get carried interest. I’ve always said this, when we did the merger with Colony when we became a REIT and then we de-REITed, I said, look, the only way you’re going to play this game and the way that we’re going to beat American Tower, Digital Realty, Equinix, and Crown is you’ve got to go asset light. If you’re going to be in the digital infrastructure business, capital is everything. We couldn’t stay a REIT. We tried to stay a REIT. Ultimately, to go build, you know, one gigawatt of capacity is hard, right? You got to show up with a lot of money.

You got to show up with a lot of capabilities. The reason Digital Realty and Equinix have missed all these big bookings is because they don’t have the capital. They don’t have 10 different platforms, 10 different CEOs, a big land bank, and a big power bank. The way that we have surpassed these guys is that we made the decision six years ago, whether it was popular or unpopular. We de-REITed. We went asset light. We had a series of silos and funds where we could raise capital very quickly. Ultimately, we felt the free cash flow conversion and fee and carry was a better bet than just only being able to deploy, you know, I mean, Andy’s going to have a great year at Digital Realty. I love Andy. I love what he’s doing. He’s going to deploy a couple billion dollars of capital. I’m deploying $50 billion.

The quantum at which we’re playing and the level at which we’re playing is just a step function higher than the other digital REITs. We’ve really created some differentiation. The only problem is I went from this sandbox, which was competing against my friends that run Digital Realty and American Tower. Now we’re in the alt space. Now people look at us and say, OK, you’re essentially the Blackstone of digital infrastructure, right? I’m like, OK, fine. I’ll accept that. The only problem is they manage a trillion in assets. We manage $106 billion of assets. Now my competition isn’t so much whether I can win the bookings or I can win the power. We’re winning the bookings. We’re winning the power battle. Now the real challenge is, you know, how do we match up against Blackstone, Brookfield, Ares, Apollo, KKR?

There, we’ve got to go out and we’ve got to compete for capital. We’re doing a great job. I think for our size, we punch way above our weight class. I was just with an investor. They said, you know, how do you do it? How can you show up and beat someone like Blackstone on a site like Lancaster? I said, it’s really simple. I think investors, private capital investors, really appreciate specialization. I think when we sit with an LP, whether it’s the government of Singapore, whether it’s Abu Dhabi’s investment authority, the ability at which we speak about this asset class is at a very, very intrinsic level. We understand land use. We understand zoning. We understand will serve letters. We understand how to build a microgrid. I can negotiate a master lease agreement against Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon.

These are the things that candidly Blackstone can’t do. They can outsource it to a portfolio company and then go do it. We do this at a very, very fundamental ground level. At the same time, I don’t have private wealth distribution. I don’t have a B-REIT. I don’t have 200 salespeople running around, you know, selling the 30-year track record of Blackstone, which is great. We got to earn that. The stock is in transition because we moved from being a digital REIT into this world of the financial alts world. I went from being the biggest in digital infrastructure to the smallest in alts. It’s a real challenge. I think I wake up every day. We’re tackling that. We’ve done a good job, I think, conveying our value proposition to people that own financials.

As much as I love coming to conferences like this, which is really what I’ve been doing for 30 years, I now have to spend half my time going to financial conference and explaining FRE and carried interest and EPS and all the things that we’re doing. It’s a challenge, but it’s fun.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Got it. To the AI point, you know, training has been what’s been driving a lot of the leasing in the past few years. It feels like inferencing is starting to take over a bit. I think there’s still a lot of companies that are trying to figure out what these enterprise applications are and how this actually manifests at the end of the day. From your seat, what are you seeing? Where do you think we are in the transition from training to inferencing? As you have discussions with enterprises, how do you think this all kind of shakes out?

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: I think we’re really nascent in AI inferencing. I think if we were playing kind of a nine-inning baseball game, we’d be in the top of the first. I think from a training perspective and from an LLM perspective, we’re kind of in the third inning. If you track the CapEx and you track the amount of power that’s been lit, today the industry is at about 68 gigawatts. That’s up from 54 gigawatts last year. There are a couple of different curves in growth in terms of how you look at it. Some people think we’ll get to about 137 gigawatts. Our forecast is 196. The Jensen forecast and Masa forecast is like, and Elon is like 300, of course. Somewhere in between is probably the truth, which I think hopefully is our forecast, which is 200 gigawatts.

I was in LA yesterday speaking at the McKinsey & Company Global Initiative, which was, candidly, the whole conference was took over by the talk of power. For two days, top CEOs in the U.S. from the power industry, from the infrastructure industry all came together. It just turned into a power conference for two days where everyone just talked about power. Four or five really good CEOs in the room that have been in the power industry a really long time. I think the consensus is that the U.S. has to basically build 200 gigawatts of new power. That’s daunting because the U.S. has been on a cadence since 2005 where we’ve been lighting 4 gigawatts of new capacity pretty consistently. If you look at that chart, it’s literally like this, somewhere between 3.8 and 4.2, but it never deviates. The utility industry of the U.S.

has been on this very cozy and comfortable kind of 4-gigawatt ride. You see this curve. You see what’s happening in terms of consumption. You see where the grid is. Baseload is kind of clipping along like this. Up here is actually what’s needed to keep the country running. It’s daunting. The gap just keeps widening and widening and widening. You have a supply and trade imbalance. The supply side essentially is, in the next decade, we’re going to be at somewhere around 120 to 130 gigawatts of baseload available for data centers. Again, we need probably 200 to 300. There’s this big gap. Whenever I see a chart that shows a big gap in supply and trade amounts, I get excited because it’s opportunity. We made the decision three years ago to start thinking about how do we build power?

How do we think about building grid independent power to our portfolios, to our 10 captive companies that own over 430 data centers and we have over 30,000 customers? That really struck me as opportunity because I own the real estate. I own the building. I own the customer. Why not take the approach that we go customer first? We think about places where we have excess land, where we can build microgrids, and we can source power and bring it into our microgrid and start selling power to our customers, create backup battery sets, interconnect to the grid, and then actively trade to the grid where we put power back into baseload. That’s how we’ve approached the problem. We’ve been so far successful. It’s early. I’m not going to claim any sort of victory because we’ve had some challenges along the way. We’ve built now three distinct microgrids.

We’ve got another, call it another 20 projects on the drawing board tethered to our data centers and tethered to our customers. That’s the key. The approach we took to power was kind of the same approach I’ve taken to serving digital infrastructure for 30 years, which is let’s start with the concept that you have to have a contract with a customer. Let’s just start there. In any project we get involved in in power, we have an anchor customer, just like I have an anchor customer on a tower, a fiber network, or a data center. I don’t think the power industry has really looked at it. I think the power industry has always thought, OK, I’m going to go build the power. Then I’m going to eventually just sign a PPA with somebody.

I’m going to off-take it, whether it’s to Microsoft, whether it’s to NextEra, Constellation, whoever it is, there’s always an off-take. By the way, that’s correct. If you go build a really good solar farm or you go build a great wind farm, there’s always somebody waiting to take because the grid, again, that 4 gigawatts, and you got this chart that’s going like this. There’s always off-take. Off-take is interesting. What we learned in the last two years is that off-take is an 8% to 9% IRR business. A little sleepy for us. We generally like returns kind of in that 14% to 22% range. We said, wait a second. If you just do an off-take agreement and you print that 8% to 9% IRR, that’s essentially a yield co. By the way, it’s not too dissimilar from when towers get mature, data centers get mature.

Someone’s making money on the development piece. That’s what we’ve kind of cracked the code on a little bit, how can we buy power or build power adjacent, either through leasing a transmission line or building our own private wire? We bring it into the microgrid, and that microgrid serves as essentially a massive substation that serves our data center. The key differentiator in microgrids is you don’t have to have a single source of power. You actually, in some microgrids, have two to three or four different sources of power. Take, for example, what we’ve done in Reno. We’ve got solar, we’ve got wind, we’ve got hydro, we’ve got LNG, and we have grid connectivity. I have five sources of power at the SuperNet for Switch. That’s unique. I’m not going to tell you every microgrid has five sources of power.

It’s really hard, but most of the microgrids have two to three different sources of power. We’ve been involved in a project, for example, in the UK for one of our big data centers there, and we’re using CCG and wind and grid connectivity. 120 megawatts of wind, 200 megawatts of coal, and about 58 to 60 megawatts of grid connectivity. Combining that all together, optimizing it, reducing intermodulation. By the way, at the end of the day, we have an excess 100 megawatts that we can sell back to National Grid so that we can trade power with National Grid, peak and off-peak. I’m going fast because I’m looking at the clock. We’ve got three minutes left. This is where we’re spending our time. It’s capital formation, and it’s how do we crack the power problem.

Again, we don’t have all the solutions, but what we are doing in terms of building grid independent power is working, and it’s allowing us actually to go faster. If you think about some of the big wins that we’ve recently booked at Yonder and Vantage and Switch, how are we differentiating ourselves? Power. Not like we have power in two years. We have power today, and that’s the big differentiator.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: In the last two minutes that we have, two questions for you. We don’t get to go another 20. When does power get fixed? When do we close that gap?

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: Yep.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: What are the one to two things that people are underestimating or overlooking in your company?

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: Just on power quickly, I think by 2033 to 2035, we should bring online about 60 to 80 gigawatts of nukes. That’ll really help not the data center industry, but it’ll help baseload. That’s what we need to do. The U.S. has really two problems right now. We have a baseload problem, and we have really antiquated transmission infrastructure. That was one of the thematics coming out of the McKinsey & Company conference yesterday with most of the utility CEOs. It’s like, hey, yeah, we can go build a bunch of nukes and build a lot of generation capabilities, but if we don’t fix our aging transmission infrastructure that was built in the ’50s and ’60s, how can we stay ahead or stay competitive with China in terms of our ability to produce power? It’s a 6 to 10-year journey. It’s going to transcend this White House.

It’ll transcend the next White House. We really have to take the long view. I’ve been pushing all of our relationships in Washington to think longer, to think more holistically. A lot of conversations with FERC and the DOE, and those conversations are going to continue. The two things that I think people are missing on DigitalBridge Group Inc. is pay very close attention to this conversion of our power bank into active megawatts into active carried interest. Everyone can do that math. I give our Head of Public IR, Severin White, a lot of street cred for this. He created a very simple algorithm that allows you to convert megawatt into carry. Once you start doing that, you begin to see this accrued amount of carry that starts to build, and it becomes a very, very big part of our NAV.

It becomes bigger than one-third of our NAV, actually, over time. That’s a lot of value. We’ve got to come back. You know, we’re coming back, right? We were at north of $20 in terms of share price, bottomed out in the high fives and low sixes. Now we’re building our way back through consistent earnings, building the carried interest, growing our portfolio, raising capital, and most importantly, just doing what we told the street we would do. The second thing I would say is, we put a big emphasis this year on focusing on co-investment because I think when you have great ideas and great portfolio companies, private capital will come to you. We’ve done a great job of increasing our margins in co-invest, which in turn has a direct flow through to the margin or FRE. We’ve generally been kind of in the low 30%.

Our goal is to get to a 40% margin on a run rate basis by the end of this year. We’ve instituted our first two levels of cost cut. A third level of cost cuts is coming. On top of that, we’re forming new capital, which we think has a 100% margin straight through. Keep your eye on FRE. Our FRE is growing, and we’re trying to put little crumbs on the trail to give people the sort of ammunition to build that model. I think between the growth in FRE, the growth in margins, and most importantly, the growth in carried interest, we’ve got the ship now turned in a direction for a lot of growth the next 24 months.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. Great place to stop. Thanks so much for being here.

Marc Ganzi, CEO, DigitalBridge Group Inc.: Thank you. Appreciate it.

Josh France, Telecom and Communications Infrastructure Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Thank you.

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