Data center deals boost July CRE sales to highest since 2005

Commercial real estate just had its best July in twenty years, and the reason isn’t offices, apartments, or strip malls. It’s data centers, the sprawling, power-hungry facilities that house the servers keeping AI models, cloud platforms, and streaming services alive.

National data center transaction volume hit $7.7B in the second quarter of 2026 across just 23 deals, representing a staggering 1,806% increase year-over-year. For the first half of 2026, total data center volumes reached $8.5B, up 476% from the same period last year.

One deal, massive ripple effects

The single largest contributor to these numbers was Digital Realty’s $5.6B acquisition of four data center properties from Blackstone. That transaction alone accounted for nearly half of Northern Virginia’s $11.5B in total CRE sales volume during the first half of 2026.

Broader CRE investment sales in Q2 2026 reached $136.6B, a 14% year-over-year increase according to MSCI data. Portfolio-level and entity-level deals provided much of the lift, with the Digital Realty-Blackstone transaction serving as the poster child for how a handful of mega-deals can move the needle on an entire asset class.

To put the data center surge in context alongside other property types: multifamily attracted $36.7B and industrial pulled in $32.5B in June 2026. Data centers, at $7.7B, are a fraction of those figures in absolute terms. But the growth rate is in a different universe entirely.

Why data centers are eating the CRE landscape

The last time July CRE volumes hit comparable levels was 2005, and back then the drivers were entirely different. A similar spike occurred in July 2021, driven primarily by apartment sales during the pandemic-era housing boom. This time, the catalyst is infrastructure spending tied to artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

The uneven recovery everywhere else

The 14% year-over-year increase in overall Q2 sales sounds healthy, but it masks significant divergence across property types. Individual asset sales across many sectors showed modest performance, even as portfolio-level transactions provided the headline numbers.

When 23 deals can move a national sector metric by 1,806%, you’re looking at a market where a small number of participants wield enormous influence over pricing signals and sentiment.

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