CBRE's evolution into a data center heavyweight is happening faster—and more materially—than its headline numbers initially suggest.
While the company's Q1 earnings highlighted a tripling of data center revenue year over year, the real story is scale. According to the April 23, 2026 earnings call, CEO Robert Sulentic said the business generated $1.7 billion in 2025 and $580 million in just the first quarter of 2026, putting it on pace to exceed $2.72 billion this year. That implies more than 60% year-over-year growth, transforming what was once a niche service line into a core revenue driver.
Importantly, this isn't a story about CBRE deploying artificial intelligence internally—it's about positioning itself at the center of the infrastructure that enables AI. As hyperscale demand accelerates, the firm is capitalizing on its land, power access, and entitlement expertise, which have become critical bottlenecks in data center development.
One of the foundational advantages dates back to CBRE's 2006 acquisition of Trammell Crow. Sulentic emphasized on the earnings call that the platform "has been really good at acquiring land, entitling land, improving land, and positioning land to be more valuable than it was before we got involved with it." That capability is now directly feeding its data center pipeline, with CBRE having "secured dozens of land sites that have the potential to be data center land sites over time."
The strategy reflects a broader shift in commercial real estate, where value creation is increasingly tied to infrastructure readiness rather than just location. Data centers require not only land, but also access to power, water, and favorable entitlements—constraints that are reshaping site selection and pricing dynamics across multiple markets. CBRE is leaning into this complexity by working closely with hyperscalers to navigate those hurdles. As Sulentic put it, "And we think we'll have a relatively steady stream of opportunities in data center land over the next few years."
That positioning appears to be setting CBRE apart from its brokerage peers. According to Fortune, William Blair analyst Stephen Sheldon said the firm has greater exposure to the data center sector than competitors like JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, and Colliers. "I don't think it's slowing down anytime soon," Sheldon told Fortune. "I'm sure there's going to be friction points and bottlenecks over the next five-plus years, but I don't think anyone would doubt that this is going to be a massive secular investment area [for CBRE]."
CBRE's early entry into the sector also created a compounding advantage. Sulentic told Fortune that the company's involvement began modestly before scaling quickly. "We started to do some work for data center clients," he said. "So, we started managing data centers, and because of our scale, we started doing a lot of that pretty rapidly. Once data centers appeared on the scene and grew rapidly, we grew rapidly."
That growth has been reinforced by increasingly sophisticated site selection capabilities. Sheldon noted that CBRE leveraged its market intelligence to anticipate demand. "I think they used some of their insights, knowing what land might be attractive for data center development down the road, looking at infrastructure, power grids, things like that," he said.
For the broader CRE industry, CBRE's trajectory underscores a structural shift. Traditional brokerage and leasing revenue streams are being supplemented—and in some cases outpaced—by specialized sectors tied to digital infrastructure. As AI adoption drives exponential demand for computing capacity, firms with the ability to source land, secure utilities, and manage development pipelines are positioned to capture outsized growth.
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