Digital Realty Trust, Inc.

And welcome to the Digital Realty first quarter 2024 earnings call. Please note that this event is being recorded. During today's presentation, all parties will be in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Callers will be limited to one question. I would now like to turn the call over to Jordan Sadler, Digital Realty's Senior Vice President of Public and Private Investor Relations. Jordan, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome everyone to Digital Realty's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call are President and CEO Andy Power and CFO Matt Mercier. Chief Investment Officer Greg Wright, Chief Technology Officer Chris Sharp, and Chief Revenue Officer Colin McLean are also on the call and will be available for Q&A. Management will be making forward-looking statements, including guidance and underlying assumptions of today's call. 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 Andy, let me offer a few key takeaways from our first quarter. First, our customer value proposition continues to resonate as reflected by an AI-driven acceleration in leasing activity that drove our overall leasing volume to a new record. First quarter leasing was more than 40% above our prior record, principally driven by an improvement in pricing. Second, our fundamental strength picked up where 2023 left off. record cash releasing spread, and strong stabilized same-capital cash NLI growth of 4.7%, reflecting continued strength in data center fundamentals combined with the benefit of the improvements that we have made to our portfolio over the past year. And third, we've made meaningful progress on our 2024 funding plan already, with just over a billion dollars of fresh capital raised from asset sales and joint ventures to date, putting us above the low end of our guidance range for 2024, just one-third of the way through the year. As a result of our efforts, reported leverage fell from 6.2 times at year end to 6.1 times at March 31, and remained at 5.8 times on a pro forma basis, reflecting completed and announced transactions. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Andy Power.

Thanks, Jordan. Thanks to everyone for joining our call. Following the successful course we set in 2023, Digital Realty experienced accelerating momentum in the first quarter of 2024, headlined by a collection of multifaceted AI opportunities that drove a number of new leasing records.