The Data Infrastructure Buildout Has a Power Problem

Every hyperscaler lease, every new cell tower, every satellite handshake runs on two things: bandwidth and watts. The data infrastructure theme tracks 79 companies across the full stack — from the radio towers Crown Castle owns across the U.S. to the subsea and terrestrial fiber networks Ciena equips. What's changed in the last two years is where the constraint actually lives. It isn't fiber. It isn't spectrum. It's power.

Constellation Energy and GE Vernova don't look like data companies on the surface, but data center operators are signing long-term power purchase agreements directly with nuclear and gas generators at a pace that would have seemed absurd five years ago. The grid is the new bottleneck, and the companies that control reliable, carbon-managed generation are becoming de facto data infrastructure plays.

Connectivity Is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

Verizon and Ericsson represent the mature layer of this theme — ubiquitous, cash-generative, but slow-growth. The more interesting signal comes from the edges. AST SpaceMobile is building a direct-to-device satellite broadband network designed to eliminate dead zones entirely, targeting the roughly 40% of the globe where terrestrial carriers don't reach. Digital Realty Trust sits at the intersection of real estate and compute, owning the physical colocation campuses where enterprise and hyperscaler workloads actually run. Both companies represent structural demand, not cyclical spend.

Globally, carriers like SK Telecom, TELUS, and PLDT are building out 5G and fiber at different speeds depending on their regulatory environments and capital access. KT Corp in South Korea is among the most advanced in dense urban 5G deployment. The common thread is that each of these carriers is simultaneously a customer of data infrastructure hardware and an operator of it — their capex decisions drive demand for everyone else in the chain.

The Energy Angle Is Structural, Not Cyclical

Data centers consumed roughly 1-2% of global electricity a decade ago. AI workloads are turbocharged by GPU clusters that draw power at densities traditional data center designs weren't built for. That's not a temporary surge. It's a permanent step-change in how much electricity the digital economy needs.

Constellation Energy restarted the Three Mile Island nuclear unit specifically to serve a Microsoft data center deal — a concrete signal of how seriously hyperscalers are pursuing always-on, low-carbon baseload. GE Vernova manufactures the gas turbines and grid equipment that bridge nuclear and renewables when demand spikes. These aren't peripheral plays — they're foundational to whether data infrastructure scales at all.

NRG Energy is also threading this needle, positioning its generation assets toward the commercial and industrial customers — data centers prominent among them — that need guaranteed power rather than spot-market exposure.

What the Theme Rewards

The companies that win here share one trait: they own irreplaceable physical assets. Tower REITs like Crown Castle benefit from every new spectrum band carriers deploy because the same steel holds more radios. Digital Realty benefits from every workload that leaves on-premise servers. Satellite operators like AST SpaceMobile win if terrestrial coverage fails to close the global gap fast enough.

The risk is capital intensity. Building this infrastructure requires sustained investment at a moment when interest rates have made debt expensive. Companies with strong balance sheets and long-term contracted revenue — power purchase agreements, tower leases, colocation contracts — are better insulated than those chasing growth on borrowed time.

Explore more in the ETF library for funds tracking connectivity and digital infrastructure exposure.