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8/4/2026
Thank you for standing by. You're on hold for the Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust second quarter 2026 investor call. At this time, we're gathering additional participants and should be underway shortly. We appreciate your patience and ask that you continue to hold. Good day and welcome to the Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust second quarter 2026 investor call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. If you require operator assistance, please press star zero. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Tim Hayes, Vice President, Shareholder Relations. Please go ahead.
Good morning and welcome everyone to Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. I'm joined today by Nick Pell, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Forman, Chief Investment Officer, Tony Marone, Chief Financial Officer, and Andrew Winchell, Executive Vice President of Strategy. This morning, we filed our 10-Q and issued a press release summarizing our results, which are available on our website and have been filed with the SEC. I would like to remind everyone that today's call will include forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially. For discussion of some of the risks that could affect results, please see the risk factors section within our prospectus dated May 13, 2026, which is accessible on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. We do not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP measures on this call, and for reconciliations, you should refer to the press release in 10Q. This audio cast is copyrighted material of Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust and may not be duplicated without our consent. For the second quarter, we reported GAAP net income of 14 cents per share, while funds from operations, or FFO, was 7 cents per share, and adjusted FFO, or AFFO, was 8 cents per share. As a reminder, we completed our initial public offering in May 2026 and had no real estate operations during the quarter ended June 30, 2026 as the net proceeds of the offering were invested in cash and cash equivalents. Therefore, we do not believe 2Q results are indicative of the operating performance we expect to achieve upon deployment of our capital into target assets. With that, I will now turn the call over to Nick.
Thanks, Tim, and welcome everyone to Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust inaugural earnings conference call. We are thrilled to have recently completed our IPO in May, listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BXDC, and successfully raising $2 billion of gross proceeds, the largest blind pool REIT IPO in history. We are grateful for the support of our investors who participated in the offering and look forward to the continued partnership as we deploy our capital and seek to capture highly compelling risk-adjusted returns in the stabilized data center market. The opportunity set in front of us is massive, with a total addressable market for our business expected to eclipse a trillion dollars over the next several years, and yet we believe we are still in the early innings of long-term capital formation in the sector. With strong underlying fundamentals and limited scale buyers in the market dedicated to this strategy today, we view this acquisition environment to be one of the best we have seen and expect it to become even more fruitful as the newly delivered assets come online in the next several years, with the sector anticipated to double in size. and we also view recent debt capital markets volatility as a potential catalyst for new deal flow. We believe BXDC is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this generational opportunity benefiting greatly from Blackstone's data, relationships and experience as the largest investor in data centers and digital infrastructure globally. For those newer to our story, BXDC is a REIT focused on acquiring stabilized mission critical data centers that power the modern digital economy. Across Black Zone, we have seen firsthand that the convergence of AI, cloud computing, and the broader digitalization of our economy are driving unprecedented demand for compute, with data centers serving as the backbone of this revolution. Even as demand accelerates, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build data centers across the U.S. Power, labor, zoning, supply chains, and other factors have all become real constraints, and we expect many of these pressures to persist over time. To contextualize the supply and demand dynamics, vacancy in U.S. data center markets continues to trend lower and reached an all-time low of approximately 1% in Q1. In our target markets, vacancy is essentially non-existent at just 0.4% today. With limited availability, rent growth has accelerated, increasing by more than 100% from 2021 levels in the U.S., We believe these robust market fundamentals will bolster performance and long-term demand for our target assets. As one of the largest private capital providers in the AI ecosystem, Blackstone has a bird's eye view of the entire digital infrastructure landscape. This perspective provided clear line of sight into the rapid evolution of the stabilized hyperscaler data center marketplace, which we translated into BXDC's dedicated strategy designed to generate attractive and predictable cash flow and with embedded growth drivers supporting strong risk-adjusted returns. And our strategy is simple. Acquire recently built high-quality income-producing data centers located in Tier 1 markets with long-term leases to top investment-grade hyperscalers. No development risk, no power or entitlement risk, and powerful downside protection with assets fully leased at the time of acquisition to some of the most creditworthy tenants in the world. We have a robust pipeline of attractive investments that fit these parameters and are actively engaged with a number of third parties to acquire our first assets, while also planting seeds for future growth opportunities. We are confident in the near-term prospects for capital deployment. We also have increasing visibility over the long term given the accelerating hyperscaler CapEx spend which is expected to exceed $800 billion this year, just from the top five alone, nearly double last year, and a fraction of the $3 trillion we expect to see over the next five years. We expect that the significant capital requirements to build out this infrastructure could create additional compelling opportunities to work strategically with the hyperscalers themselves. We remain confident in our ability to deploy capital at attractive yields with close to $30 billion of recent comparable transactions in the market pricing at the low to mid six cap rates. Consistent with our buy box and the pipeline opportunities we see, cash flow yields and annual rent escalators set up powerful flywheel for growth and position BXDC to capitalize on attractive opportunities. We view our growth potential as highly compelling relative value in today's market given the long duration cash flow profile Thank you for joining us today. The size of the market and our ability to deploy capital at scale provide a clear roadmap for growth in our portfolio and earnings power. Thank you again for your time and interest in BXDC. I will now pass it over to Tony to discuss our financial results for the quarter.
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