By Diana Olick | CNBC
The sudden surge in demand for data is fast creating new commercial real estate sectors – not just data centers, but so-called quantum real estate and powered land.
The former refers to structures designed to house specialized quantum computers. The latter is 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.
There are currently about 20,000 acres of powered land sitting under operational data centers around the world. Roughly 40,000 acres of powered land, almost 2 billion square feet, are needed to support current projections for data center growth over the next five years, according to a new research paper from Hines, a global real estate investment manager. That’s equivalent to just under the size of three Manhattans or about 1½ times the size of Paris.
