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 ...