AI has sent demand soaring, investment is flooding into the sector and, unsurprisingly, everyone wants a slice.

Developers, investors, advisers and plenty of people from the traditional real-estate world are looking at digital infrastructure and thinking: we need to be doing some of that.

And genuinely, welcome.
But there is a slight problem. 

Data centres aren’t simply warehouses with more power. And decades of knowledge about how land, power, fibre, planning, construction, supply chains and delivery come together can’t be acquired quite as quickly as a new service line can be added to a website.

We were reminded of that recently when some of our work found its way into somebody else’s presentation. Not inspired by. Not built upon. More of a copy, paste, change-the-logo situation.

Flattering? Perhaps.
Awkward? Definitely.

But it also highlighted something much more important about where the market is today.

When an industry grows this quickly, there will always be businesses rushing to establish their credentials within it. The difficulty is distinguishing between those who genuinely understand the sector and those who have simply learned how to talk about it.

Because you can borrow the terminology. You can replicate a diagram. You can even copy a presentation. But, what you can’t copy is the knowledge behind it.

And when something doesn’t go according to the= PowerPoint – which, inevitably, it won’t – you need people around the table who know what they’re looking at and what to do next.

So perhaps there’s a useful lesson here for all of us already working in digital infrastructure.

As the sector attracts more attention, choose your partners carefully. Work with people whose experience you know, whose judgement you trust and whose expertise extends beyond what’s written on the slide.

And if you do want a piece of the cake?

Bring a fork.

Leave our report alone.