Digital Realty Trust, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Digital Realty second quarter 2021 earnings call. Please note this event is being recorded. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Callers will be limited to one question plus a follow up and we will conclude promptly at the bottom of the hour. I would now like to turn the call over to John Stewart, Digital Realty's Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, Andrea. The speakers on today's call are CEO Bill Stein and CFO Andy Power. Chief Investment Officer Greg Wright, Chief Technology Officer Chris Sharp, and Chief Revenue Officer Corey Dyer are also on the call and will be available for Q&A. Management may make forward-looking statements, including guidance and underlying assumptions. Forward-looking statements are based on expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a further discussion of risks related to our business, see our 10-K and subsequent filings with the SEC. This call will contain non-GAAP financial information. Reconciliations to net income are included in the supplemental package furnished to the SEC and available on our website. Before I turn the call over to Bill, I'd like to hit the tops of the waves on our second quarter results. We continue to enhance our product mix, with a record contribution from our sub-one megawatt plus interconnection category. We extended our sustainability leadership with the publication of our third annual ESG report. We raised revenue and EBITDA guidance for the second quarter in a row, setting the stage for accelerating growth in cash flow. Last but not least, we further strengthened the balance sheet with the redemption of high-coupon preferred stock and the issuance of low-cost, long-term, fixed-rate debt. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Bill.

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us. Our formula for long-term value creation is a global, connected, sustainable framework. We continue to advance along these lines during the second quarter. Our business continues to globalize, and once again, we generated solid performance and strong bookings across all regions. Our full-spectrum product offering continues to blossom. with record sub-one megawatt bookings in the second quarter and regional highs in both EMEA and APAC. Together, with interconnection, the sub-one megawatt category comprised nearly half of our total bookings, demonstrating customers' enthusiastic adoption of platform digital to help accomplish their digital transformation initiatives. I'll discuss our sustainable growth initiatives on page three. In June, We were awarded the Green Lease Leader Gold Award from the Institute for Market Transformation and the U.S. Department of Energy for the third year. We remain the only data center provider to receive this award, which recognizes Digital Realty as a leader in the real estate industry that incorporates green leasing provisions to better align our interests with our customers and drive high performance and healthy buildings. During the second quarter, we published our third annual ESG report, detailing our 2020 sustainability initiatives, including the utilization of renewable energy for 100% of our energy needs across our entire portfolio in Europe, as well as our U.S. co-location portfolio, and reaching 50% of our global needs. We also reported progress towards our science-based target, ensuring a deep focus on our renewable energy energy efficiency, and supply chain sustainability initiatives. Our ESG report highlights many of our ongoing initiatives, including our diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts along with our community involvement. Digital Realty is committed to being an active member of and giving back to the communities where we operate globally. We encourage and celebrate community involvement and employee engagement activities through our Do Better Together initiative. We also recently underscored our commitment to transparency and accountability on our diversity, equity, and inclusion journey with the publication of our EEO-1 report. Events over the past year and a half have demonstrated that now more than ever, ESG belongs at the forefront of our business. I'm proud of our leadership in this area as we advance our broader goal of delivering sustainable growth for all of our stakeholders, investors, customers, employees, and the communities we serve around the world. Let's turn to our investment activity on page four. We are continuing to invest in our global platform with 39 projects underway around the world as of June 30th, totaling nearly 300 megawatts of incremental capacity, most of which is scheduled for delivery over the next 12 months. We are investing most heavily in EMEA, with 19 projects totaling over 150 megawatts of capacity under construction. Most of this capacity is highly connected, including projects in Frankfurt, Marseille, Paris, and Zurich. Demand remains strong across these metros, and each continues to attract service providers as well as enterprise customers from around the world, many of which contributed to a truly standout performance by the region during the second quarter in the up to one megawatt category. In North America, over half of our capacity under construction is concentrated in two hot markets, Portland and Toronto, that can sometimes be overlooked in favor of more traditional North American data center metros. We've had tremendous recent success in these two metros. We have 30 megawatts under construction in Portland, or more specifically Hillsborough, that are now fully pre-leased, while our Toronto connected campus continues to gain momentum as the premier Canadian hub for global cloud service providers and enterprise customers. Finally, in Asia Pacific, we are accelerating our organic growth in this underserved region. We opened our third data center in Singapore, a 50 megawatt facility that received permitting prior to the moratorium on new data center construction. Demand for this scarce capacity is robust, and we have another 18 megawatts largely pre-sold and scheduled to open this quarter. Also coming soon in this region are a pair of MC Digital Reality data centers in Japan. With the world's eyes currently on Tokyo for the Olympics, we are opening a new Tokyo facility that's poised to win the gold medal. We are also opening another data center in Osaka this quarter, along with our first data center and the first carrier neutral offering in Seoul, Korea during the fourth quarter. We are very excited about the opportunity in Seoul. And earlier this morning, we announced that we've acquired another land parcel to expand our connected campus, enabling us to accommodate the hyperscale demand that has been clamoring for capacity in our first highly connected facility. Finally, Earlier this month, we announced our intention to enter India in partnership with Brookfield Infrastructure. Given the success of our existing partnership on the Ascenti platform in Latin America, the complementary skills and expertise that we both bring to this partnership, and with the significant growth opportunity available in India, we are excited to expand our footprint in this robust and dynamic market. Let's turn to the macro environment on page five. We are fortunate to be operating in a business levered to secular demand drivers. Our leadership position provides us with a unique vantage point to detect secular trends as they emerge globally on platform digital. The first of these trends is the growing importance of data gravity for global 2000 enterprises. Last year, we introduced the Data Gravity Index, our market intelligence tool which forecast the growing intensity of enterprise data creation lifecycle and its gravitational impact on global IT infrastructure between key global markets. Earlier this year, we took the next step and published an industry manifesto enabling connected data communities to guide cross-industry collaboration, tackle data gravity head-on, and unlock a new era of growth opportunity for all companies. Earlier this week, we announced a collaboration with Xeo to further our interconnection business through the creation of an open fabric of fabrics. With data sets exploding and data gravity challenges expanding, this initiative will enable multinational enterprises to connect these data oceans through fabric and orchestration. Third-party research continues to support data gravity's growing importance. Market intelligence firm Gartner recently conducted its sixth annual survey of chief data officers, and less than 35% of these executives reported their business have achieved their data sharing objectives, including data exchange with external data sources that drive revenue-generating business outcomes. Issues often arise due to multiple data hosting and processing meeting places, together with the need for appropriate security controls and the inability to overcome latency challenges with direct private interconnection between many counterparties. Platform Digital was designed to solve these problems. Digital transformation is compounding this enterprise data and connectivity problem. Recent research indicates that enterprise workflows utilize an average of 400 unique data sources by exchanging data with 27 external cloud products. Digital Realty's enterprise and service provider customers are turning to platform digital to overcome these issues by deploying their own data hubs and using interconnection to securely exchange data in and across multiple metros. Our leadership position is resonating with industry experts and influencers. For the second consecutive year, Digital Realty was named a Global Leader by IDC Marketscape for data center co-location and interconnection services, further acknowledgement of our consistently improving customer capabilities. This recognition reflects our execution against the platform digital roadmap, providing unique, differentiated value for customers with our fit-for-purpose, full-spectrum, global capabilities. Earlier this month, CloudScene again ranked Digital Realty as the strongest provider of data center ecosystems in EMEA for the second consecutive year. Digital Realty was ranked second in both North America as well as Latin America and jumped up three spots to number seven in Asia. Also in July, GigaOM published their analysis of edge infrastructure capabilities. Digital Realty ranked as an industry leader on multiple criteria across three broad categories. Our capabilities were ranked highest in vendor positioning and evaluation metrics comparison and second among the key criteria comparison. Given the resiliency of demand drivers underpinning our business and the relevance of our platform to meeting customers' needs, we believe we are well-positioned to continue to deliver sustainable growth for customers, shareholders, and employees, whatever the macro environment may hold in store. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Andy to take you through our financial results. Thank you, Bill.