Iron Mountain at Global Communications Infrastructure Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, September 16, 2025, Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) took the stage at the Global Communications Infrastructure Conference to discuss its strategic direction. The company highlighted its robust Records and Information Management (RIM) business and its growing portfolio in Asset Lifecycle Management, Data Centers, and Digital Solutions. While the RIM business remains a cornerstone, Iron Mountain is looking to its growth portfolio for future expansion. CEO Bill Meaney and CFO Barry Hytinen provided a positive outlook, emphasizing the company’s strong financial position and growth prospects.

Key Takeaways

• Iron Mountain’s core RIM business accounts for over 70% of its operations, with consistent growth in pricing and volume.
• The growth portfolio, including Data Centers, is expanding at over 20% annually, with significant capacity additions planned.
• A new five-year contract with the U.S. Department of Treasury is expected to drive future growth in digital solutions.
• The company’s data center business is projected to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2026.
• Iron Mountain maintains a fully funded growth plan, with leverage around five times.

Financial Results

• Incremental EBITDA flow-through rate stands at 47% at the corporate level.
• Core RIM business boasts high incremental margins, ranging from 70% to 80%.
• Data Centers business has seen EBITDA margins increase by 700 basis points year-over-year, now exceeding 50%.
• Digital Solutions and Asset Lifecycle Management businesses have margins between 20% and 30%.
• The data center business is expected to generate $790 to $800 million in revenue in 2025, with a 25% growth target for 2026.

Operational Updates

Data Centers

• Plans to bring 175 megawatts online in Northern Virginia, 200 megawatts in Richmond, 36 megawatts in Chicago, 30 megawatts in Amsterdam, and 75 megawatts in Madrid over the next 12 to 36 months.
• Current capacity is 400 megawatts, with a focus on inference capacity aligning with AI and language models.
• Securing power remains a significant constraint.

Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM)

• Data center decommissioning comprises 40% of ALM, with the enterprise component making up the remaining 60%.
• The majority of the ALM business involves decommissioning gear from third-party data centers.

Future Outlook

• The data center business anticipates 25% top-line growth next year from existing leases.
• Continued growth expected in ALM, driven by data center decommissioning and enterprise business opportunities.
• The AI refresh cycle for GPUs is anticipated to increase volume.
• The U.S. Department of Treasury contract is expected to ramp up in future years, contributing to growth.

Q&A Highlights

• Large data center commitment decision cycles remain stable, though fewer customers are securing long-term leases.
• Focus on low-risk waterfront properties in availability zones.
• Core business requires limited capital for growth, supported by cash flow and EBITDA growth.
• Additional funding options include sale leasebacks and asset-level financing on long-duration contracts.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Iron Mountain’s strategic plans and financial outlook.

Full transcript - Global Communications Infrastructure Conference:

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Welcome, everybody. I’m John Atkin with RBC Capital Markets, and please be spending the next 20 minutes with the CEO of Iron Mountain, Bill Meaney, and the Chief Financial Officer, Barry Hytinen. Welcome.

Bill Meaney, CEO, Iron Mountain: Thanks, John.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: I’m going to ask some questions about kind of the core RIM business, document storage, and then pivot to Data Centers, and then pivot to Asset Lifecycle Management. If there are questions at the end, we’ll have time for maybe one or two. Focusing on kind of the core business, maybe update us on how you’ve been able to maintain the very strong pricing economics within RIM, and maybe unpack different sectors or different geographies where you see storage volumes shifting in any notably different way.

Bill Meaney, CEO, Iron Mountain: Thank you, John, and thanks for having us, and thanks for attending. I think maybe I’ll start at a high level in terms of what we see in terms of the records management, in terms of pricing and volume growth, and then Barry can give you a little bit more detail in terms of how we execute around that. I think one great thing about how we’ve been building the company over time, if you think about it, is that still 70+% of the business is that records management business. During that same period of time when we started this journey, it was 100%.

What’s happened with the other 30%, which is the growth portfolio, which is Asset Lifecycle Management, Data Centers, and the Digital Solutions business, and those three businesses combined drove north of 20% or deliver now approximately 6% consolidated growth in terms of top-line growth for the company and similar levels of bottom-line growth. That 70% has become more valuable, not less valuable, during that period of time and continues to grow. The reason that’s more valuable is because of those other services, especially around the digitization transformation services and the Asset Lifecycle Management, because people see that if you store documents with Iron Mountain, you have an automatic option that you can generate by a flick of a switch or a phone call or an email or a web order to actually execute around those other areas.

We’ve been really encouraged that we continue to have mid to upper single-digit revenue management or pricing action in that business because of what we’re able to give. Volumetrically, you know it’s not a fast-growing business, but it’s growing anywhere between, let’s say, 20 and 100 basis points depending on the quarter. Part of that is also driven by higher growth markets like India, whilst it may be lower pricing, it has a similar margin associated with them. Barry?

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Yeah, well said. Maybe at a very high level, I think at the corporate level, you talked about a 47% flow-through rate in terms of incremental EBITDA over incremental revenue. Maybe talk about what sort of sustainable level we could see in terms of flow-through margins going forward.

Barry Hytinen, Chief Financial Officer, Iron Mountain: John, thanks for that. Our global Records and Information Management business is, if you think about the core business that Bill was just speaking about, has very high incremental margins. Think like 70%, 80% plus. There’s also a third of that business that is services where the margins are more like in the 30s. For us, our flow-through really is based on the relative mix of where our growth is coming from. To round that out, on our Data Centers business, obviously that’s a business that’s been going from strength to strength, and we’ve been highlighting for some time that we would be seeing margins improve in that. We’ve recently been hitting 50% plus EBITDA margins, up about 700 basis points over the last couple of quarters year on year. I think that’s a reasonable place to continue to plan.

In our Digital Solutions business, that would be more like 20% to 30%. In our Asset Lifecycle Management business, the margins are anywhere from teens to 20% on our data center decommissioning business, which is currently about 40% of that business. In the other 60%, the enterprise component, that would be more like in the 20s to 30s and going higher through our ability to continue to process more and more gear ourselves and capture the full value chain. Now you put that all through the blender, and where does it get? It gets probably into the 40s to high 40s kind of blended because we’ve got really consistent growth coming out of our growth portfolio, that being Data Centers, Digital Solutions, and Asset Lifecycle Management. Those are collectively growing in excess of 20%, and we expect that to continue to do so for quite a while.

In our core physical business, it’s, as Bill just mentioned, got a very strong track record of consistent growth in that mid to upper single-digit range. Something in this vicinity makes a lot of sense recognizing that there are some mix elements.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: You hit on data centers and ALM, so let’s kind of dive into data centers a bit. I think you’ve mentioned in the fairly recent past that discussions in the first half of the year, broadly speaking, were heavily focused on large campuses supporting AI and large language models. That’s clearly not kind of your sweet spot, so to speak. Maybe elaborate a bit about how this shift has affected your pace of leasing and current build-outs and what gives you confidence around the leasing pickup going forward.

Bill Meaney, CEO, Iron Mountain: Okay, thanks for the question. I think it’s fair to say, like I would say, over the first half of the year, and I would say even the previous year, the last half, we definitely, through the conversations we had with our customers, saw a shift to focusing more and more of their CapEx on the large language model campuses, which we made an active decision not to participate. I understand that because if you think for the larger hyperscale, it’s an arms race in terms of making sure that they had a presence in the large language model space. The amount of CapEx that you have to go into both to secure the GPUs, but also secure the power, these are like anywhere from 200 to 500 megawatt campuses, that’s where their attention and their capital was definitely flowing.

What we’ve seen, I would say, in the last few months is a change in focus. I think you probably saw that in the Oracle announcement the other day. They also made reference to their looking at building and continuing to build out their inference capacity, which is where we play. Inference is usually sitting where they’re building out their cloud capacity. If I look at the pipeline we’ve been building over the last few months, we feel pretty good about that shift now back to the future, so to speak, in terms of where they actually run their IT loads on behalf of their customers.

If you think specifically for Iron Mountain, with over the next 12 to 36 months having 175 megawatts coming online in Northern Virginia, another 200 megawatts in Richmond, 36 here in this market, 30 megawatts in Amsterdam, which is a really tight market that we’ve just got the power secured, and then 75 megawatts for Madrid. We feel really good looking at that portfolio for almost 450 megawatts just in that portfolio that I said over the next 12 to 36 months. As we’re sitting here today, we have 400 megawatts leased and running. That’s more than doubling what we’re sitting with today, not counting on what’s in development that is already in the can for 25% growth next year in terms of top-line growth for the data center business. We feel we’re well positioned.

We definitely, through the conversations that we’re having with our customers now, they’re back focused on the part of the market that we play with. We’re encouraged by the pipeline we’re building around those assets.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: In terms of the velocity, a lot of discussions. Are you finding at this point in 2025 versus, say, a year ago at this conference, decision cycles around large commitments on the data center side lengthening or shortening? What’s the level of urgency? How would you characterize that amongst your customers?

Bill Meaney, CEO, Iron Mountain: I wouldn’t say the decision cycle is lengthening. I would say it’s still pretty much the same, except that I think it’s fair to say a year, year and a half ago, we were sitting here and we had some customers that were signing leases three to five years out. We don’t see the three to five years out as much anymore. From a practical standpoint, of course, we like to sign things three to five years out. From a practical standpoint, it doesn’t make a big difference in our business model because, again, the markets that we play in are what I call low-risk waterfront property. What do you gain by people going out three to five years? It gives you more certainty in terms of risk. These are not risky sites. These are in the availability zone.

From a cash flow standpoint, I wouldn’t say it’s the most material. We do see that there’s fewer customers that are securing leases three to five years out than there were, say, a year, year and a half ago.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Leasing aside, you have a lot of book not build. Barry, can you maybe talk us through the earnings growth dynamic in terms of as you deliver and customers move in, how much of AFFO growth might be driven by that sort of dynamic on the Data Center side versus RIM versus ALM?

Barry Hytinen, Chief Financial Officer, Iron Mountain: Yeah, on the data center side, we recently, in the last quarter, gave some visibility into our backlog in terms of that pre-leased volume that Bill was just speaking about. Over the remainder of this year, we’ll commence and we’re seeing nice growth such that our data center business will approach, call it $800 million, $790 some million of revenue this year in 2025. Next year, just based on what we’ve already leased and what we’re under construction on, we will be in excess of $1 billion. We’ll grow our data center business 25% next year without any additional leasing this year, John. Beyond 2026, from what we’ve already leased, we have about another $200 million of revenue growth coming in 2027 and the ensuing years after that. On top of that would be any additional leasing that we’d make going forward.

The thing that I don’t think is fully appreciated about our story, you asked about book not build sort of for the rest of the business. In our physical volume business, it is a very sticky business, right? The average box stays with us for 15 years, and our volume has been consistently slightly growing for quite a while now. That business is very much an annuity stream. We start the year with a very substantial cash flow coming out of that physical volume business. In the Asset Lifecycle Management business, the data center decommissioning business, it tends to be more of a project-based. However, the volume that we can see for the industry is growing very fast because if you think about it, we’re decommissioning gear that’s been put into data centers over the last many years. Most of the hyperscalers retrofit their gear about every five years.

As those data center platforms have been growing over the last decade, you see more and more volume coming each and every year going forward. On the enterprise side, which is the larger book of the business in Asset Lifecycle Management, it’s very much a booked business where we tend to cross-sell into our existing client base, cross-sells very well. We had a lot of opportunity because we’re only about single-digit % crossover between our core enterprise storage business to our Asset Lifecycle Management enterprise business today. That’s a big focus area. We tend to win a, let’s say, a specific location with a client and then land and expand because almost all of our clients have got multiple small vendors doing that business for them.

On the digital business, the digital business continues to expand from us on a recurring basis because more and more of our business is software as a service and multi-year contract relationships, which give us that much more visibility. It’s a business where we have a fair amount of visibility each year, John.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: We’ll do a little bit of a sidebar then on Asset Lifecycle Management, and then we’ll pivot back to data centers, maybe combining the two. You got hyperscale decommissioning, and we haven’t yet seen kind of the AI refresh cycle for GPUs in any meaningful way. Is your Asset Lifecycle Management segment mature enough to have a view as to does it make a difference whether you’re taking stuff out of somebody else’s data centers or your own data centers? Is there sort of a home field advantage to think about or too soon to say?

Barry Hytinen, Chief Financial Officer, Iron Mountain: The vast majority of the business we’re doing, like call it 99%, would be stuff coming out of other people’s data centers because that’s where the vast majority of the volume is. You think about like the 300 megawatt, 500 megawatt campuses that retrofit their gear. Having said that, going forward as we move, as we become a larger and larger player, I think there’s definitely cross-sell and synergy between our existing data center development business and our ALM decommissioning. We see that in almost all of our client relationships, John.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: On the earnings growth, you talked about a lot of the factors that drive that. One thing I don’t think I heard you say was renewal spreads. Pricing 10 years ago on wholesale hyperscale leases was going down year on year, and now we’re kind of at the stage where pricing has been going up pretty much since 2021. How much of the earnings calculus do you attribute or the earnings growth to maybe renewal spreads being favorable?

Barry Hytinen, Chief Financial Officer, Iron Mountain: In our Data Centers business, our co-location business is now the smaller portion of our business. The vast majority of our growth over the last several years and the growth that I was just speaking about is our pre-leased assets to major hyperscalers. Think about the top 10 cloud players. We’ve got relationships with many of those. Having said that, in our co-lo book of business, we’ve been seeing strength to strength on mark-to-market for years now. I mean, our vacancies are very low, and renewal spreads have been teens to 20%. In fact, in the most recent quarter, it was in that level against a similar number the prior year. We continue to see very nice improvement.

I’ll just say, even on our hyperscale relationships, John, the returns over the last several years, including things that we’re looking at now, would be of the order of 10% plus, 10%, 11% cash on cash on levered returns. It’s a good business.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Power delivery, you’ve talked about Madrid, Amsterdam, Richmond, Northern Virginia, Chicago, and each jurisdiction is different. Secured power, what are the challenges around getting more power in those and other of what you see as your key growth markets?

Bill Meaney, CEO, Iron Mountain: Those markets, we have secured the power, but you’re right. Power is the operative word these days. We feel really good that we were able to secure it around those campuses. It is a major constraint. Yesterday, I was at the White House. The EPA Administrator hosted a small group of data center customers and one cloud customer as well. The theme that they came away with, it’s all of us say we need to do more about power to remain competitive. We’re finding it, but it’s not as easy as it was five years ago.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Last question from me, and we might have time for one or two from the audience, but just kind of capital intensity. A lot of it is dedicated towards meeting data center demand. How can you maintain even the existing or even potentially higher levels of CapEx? What’s kind of your funding strategy around that?

Barry Hytinen, Chief Financial Officer, Iron Mountain: John, we, unlike a lot of data center companies, have the benefit of our core business, which is very capital-light. It requires very limited capital to grow. We start each year with a few hundred million dollars of cash flow in excess of after we paid for our dividend and paid for our maintenance CapEx. That, together with our growth in EBITDA, using a leverage at about five times, fully funds our plan. I like to say we have a fully funded plan that enables us to maintain leverage in this vicinity, and it’s part of the secret of our success, and we continue to expect that. There are some ancillary additional ways that we can fund. Over the years, we’ve done some level of sale lease backs. We’ve also done some asset level financing on some of the hyperscale tenant long duration contracts that we’ve done. That’s the model.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Actually, so one more on the government contract around Treasury. What is or is not in your guide assumptions for future growth in terms of that contract?

Barry Hytinen, Chief Financial Officer, Iron Mountain: Okay, so, I’ll give a little bit of context because not everybody probably is aware of what you’re referring to. We have, several quarters ago, a couple of quarters ago, we mentioned that we had been awarded an award from the U.S. Department of Treasury, and it was for digitization of tax returns. At that time, it was a sole source relationship that was for one year, and we had mentioned that it was about a $140 million contract. As is the case with many sole source, they actually had issued two awards. We had the $140 million, and then there was a much smaller award to another player. As is customary in sole source procurement in the government, there were contests related to that, others challenging that. The government converted that contract to a month-to-month contract for us, which we’ve been executing under.

We’re the only player supporting the government with that digitization work at this time. We’re pleased to have just gone through the rebidding of that. Importantly, we won an award from the U.S. federal government. It is a five-year contract. The volume will be dependent upon how much comes in from U.S. taxpayers in paper format over time, as well as they have awarded to three other smaller players. There will be a determinant around the service level agreements and how the processing of those returns work. I will note that, as everyone would probably imagine, it tends to be a seasonal business in our first half when more of the activity flows into the government from a tax return standpoint.

We are super excited, and I think it’s very validating of the digital work that we’ve already been doing with the government and the fact that we’re already processing under that contract, and we will continue to. We expect it to ramp. Now, coming directly to your question, we didn’t put anything in our guidance for this year related to this contract. Certainly, as we get into 2026 and give guidance for it, we will be that much closer to the more peak volumes, and we’ll give views as it relates to how that is processing. I’ll tell you, John, we’re thrilled to have been awarded the deal. We expected to win again since we had already been awarded it originally twice, and we’re looking forward to supporting the government with its efficiency efforts.

John Atkin, RBC Capital Markets: Fantastic. We are out of time. I want to thank both of you for the Q&A session.

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