Digital Realty owns and operates data centers that companies rent space, power and connectivity from rather than building and running their own facilities, competing most directly with Equinix in the data center real estate investment trust space. Its facilities house servers and networking equipment for cloud providers, enterprises and content companies, with revenue coming from long-term leases that provide fairly predictable, recurring cash flow. As a REIT, Digital Realty distributes most of its taxable income to shareholders as dividends, and its growth depends on building or acquiring new data center capacity in markets where demand for computing infrastructure is growing. Rising demand for AI computing, which requires substantial power and specialized cooling infrastructure, has driven increased interest in the type of large-scale data center capacity companies like Digital Realty provide, though building that capacity requires significant upfront capital investment.