Emily Flippen

The opportunity in data centers is increasingly looking like an opportunity in power and real estate.

We're digging in today on Motley Fool Money.

Today is Tuesday, January 13th.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money.

I'm your host, Emily Flippen, and today I'm joined by Fool analysts Anders Beiland and Dan Kaplinger as we dig into data centers and the different ways investors can play on their build-out without baking in too much risk.

We'll walk through all the different players that are helping make data centers a reality, how sustainable the build-out really is, and how mega investors are helping fund them at scale.

But to start, we'll

We have to talk about why we're discussing data centers today.

Of course, everyone knows large tech companies have been building data centers at breakneck speeds to help facilitate the AI ambitions that we all know and some of us love.

I mean, artificial intelligence requires massive amounts of data center capacity to not only handle the queries that are being sent by you and I and enterprises to LLMs, but also to help iterate and constantly train those same models.

But this is a topic that's really hitting close to home recently for individual Americans alongside investors.

I know myself, I live here in Maryland.

I'm just a stone's throw away from Northern Virginia.

It's ground zero for data center in the United States.

CBRE has recently released reports noting that data center vacancies are at all-time lows in the second half of 2025.

Many big customers

are pre-leasing out capacity into 2027 and beyond.

For the people living nearby, this means higher electricity costs and data centers obviously require massive amounts of power to run.

That's some of the backdrop.

Dan, I want to start with the capacity.