Data & Analytics
Demystified

The strategics that paid 12-14x for the fund layer now face a choice between building loan-level data solutions or buying it, and the pool of acquirable assets is smaller than the buyer list – a dynamic that will define pricing, deal structure and competitive positioning across the sector.

Data center expansion is creating a fast-moving information market around capacity, power, sites, development pipelines and transactions. Commercial value is concentrating around providers that can show operators, investors, developers and vendors where the market is growing, where constraints are emerging and where capital is moving. The analysis that follows considers how that value is distributed across the provider landscape, which businesses are best positioned and where defensibility and transaction potential are strongest.

The loan-level independents have the scarcest data assets in the sector, the fund-level platforms are owned by larger financial data platforms and one layer deep, and the valuation agents hold the best marks in the market without being data companies – a setup that defines both the competitive dynamics and the M&A logic of what comes next.