Explainer Videos
Why Interconnection Is the True Bottleneck
Interconnection is often treated as an administrative step in DC development.
This session explains why interconnection, not land, capital, or demand, determines which projects move forward and which stall. It focuses on how queues work, who controls the real choke points, and why traditional real estate intuition consistently underestimates infrastructure risk.
The 5 Myths of Data Center Siting
Data center siting is often treated as a traditional real estate exercise. It is not.
This session explains the five most common myths that distort data center site selection and lead to systematic error. These include assumptions about location, zoning, power proximity, scale, and the role of capital. The focus here is not on checklists or site promotion. It is on decision logic.
What Is the Digital Dirt Thesis?
The Digital Dirt thesis describes how land value in digital infrastructure is created.
This session explains why fully entitled land can still be functionally unusable for data center development, and why smaller or less obvious sites can outperform larger parcels when infrastructure sequencing is aligned.
Why Digital Infrastructure Is Not Traditional Real Estate
Digital infrastructure is often treated as a variation of traditional real estate.
This session explains why data center and digital infrastructure projects behave differently at a decision level. The constraints are not buildings or demand. They are power access, interconnection timing, infrastructure sequencing, and institutional control.
The focus here is not prediction or hype. It is mechanics.
The 2026–2030 Data Center Land Grab: What’s Coming
The coming data center land grab is often framed as a speculative real estate cycle.
This session explains why the 2026 to 2030 period will be shaped by infrastructure constraints rather than demand alone, and why land is being secured not for scale, but for timing and optionality.
The focus is how power availability, interconnection queues, transmission upgrades, and permitting are narrowing the site set.
Interviews & Conversations
Data Centers at a Crossroads
As data centers proliferate across the country, there's been backlash from communities and environmentalists about the speed at which they've consumed land, power and water.
Some concerns are valid, but the reality is much more layered, according to Suhail Y Tayeb, investor, developer and director of the Center for the Sustainable Built Environment at NYU's Schack Real Estate Institute. Well-planned projects data centers have gotten lumped in with poorly sited and poorly communicated ones.
"The real issue there is process, not the existence of these sites," Tayeb said during this episode of Sustainability Street, CPE's podcast on the intersection of commercial real estate and the world we live in.
© 2026 Suhail Y Tayeb. All rights reserved.