2025 Global TMT Conference. For those of you I haven't met, I'm Mike Rollins, and I cover communication services and infrastructure for Citi. Disclosures are available at the back of the room, and if you don't have access or would like another copy, please email me at michael.rollins@citi.com. We're pleased to welcome Marc Ganzi, CEO of DigitalBridge. Marc, thank you so much for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks, Michael. It's good to be back here.
Oh, it's great, great to see you. And maybe just to kick us off, you know, maybe you could share with us how DigitalBridge is differentiating itself with its platform, maybe in a couple of ways. You know, one, pursuing the investments in AI and digital infrastructure, but also how the combination of, you know, having all these companies within this portfolio approach can enhance performance and outcomes for your shareholders.
Yeah, well, thank you. You know, I like to frame that sort of answer with just the enormity of the opportunity that sits in front of us. I think people don't really get it contextually how big what's happening right now from an infrastructure perspective, and listening to my friend Steven Vondran right before you and I got on stage, this is a multi-decade opportunity. You can't frame this in the prism that we frame 2G or 5G or public cloud. This is really a transformational moment in time, and so to get the infrastructure to perform at that level, Michael, requires an investment level that we've never seen, and it requires different parts of the ecosystem to come together, but it also requires us to think about how to address problems in delivering that infrastructure, which has created some adjacent swim lanes, which really works out well for DigitalBridge.
And I'll come back to the framing of the thesis of why DigitalBridge is probably the most unique, you know, TMT stock you could possibly own. We see AI CapEx as a $7.2 trillion opportunity. We see the adjacencies of power as another $1.3 trillion opportunity in CapEx. So when you put the AI ecosystem together with power, you're talking about $8.6 trillion in CapEx. You and I used to sit at these conferences a decade ago and talk about, gee, a great CapEx year was if a customer spent $100 million in CapEx. So just in a period of 10 years of how far we've come from a sector perspective, and DigitalBridge is 12 years old now, it's staggering the amount of CapEx that's required to do what we need to do to support our customers.
I've been doing this. You and I have been friends almost over close to 30 years. You know, I got my start in the 1990s like you. I've never seen anything framed like this in my career, and the number one thing that is required to deliver for shareholders today is your ability to form capital. If you cannot form capital, Michael, you're out of the equation. You know, again, I'm not picking on Steve, but we're good friends. Vondran and I have known each other a really long time. He owns CoreSite. CoreSite is not building 200 MW-400-MW campuses. CoreSite is not in the room in a 1-GW conversation with a customer. I'm not only in that room, I'm the guy making it happen. That's a very different position, and it all revolves around this notion of being asset-light versus being asset-heavy.
I made a decision to de-rate this business two years ago because I saw what was coming. Just like I saw what was coming in the '90s, like I saw what was coming out of the dot-com crash, I've been able to identify cycles very early, and this battle, this opportunity is just different. And, you know, what you had on the stage previously was the right solution for the last 30 years in digital infrastructure. What you see sitting in front of you right now is the solution for the next 30 years. The recognition of being asset-light and understanding how to form capital is what gives you the seat at the table to go have these conversations, not just in data centers, but in towers and in fiber and in power.
A great example of that in towers was American Tower didn't have a shot on goal on Verizon. We were the preferred partner. We weren't the highest bidder, but we won those Verizon towers because I have a 30-year relationship with Verizon of trust and building network for them and not gouging them on MLAs, and again, you talk about the ecosystem. The second part of your question is, how does DigitalBridge show up? We have 57 companies around the world. We understand how all the pieces of the ecosystem tie together, whether it's connectivity, dark fiber, interconnection, edge compute, hyperscale, private cloud, public cloud. Our portfolio companies wake up every day, and we address thousands of customers, tens of thousands of customers.
I look at it and say, you can go as an investor and you can go buy stocks and take out a single arrow and shoot at a target like American Tower and you're probably going to do really well. You'll do well over a decade performance. You can say, look, I want to be with the guy that has multiple arrows in his quiver and can shoot at multiple targets to create bigger returns and bigger outcomes. In that asset-light model where we're forming capital and we're doing them in permanent capital vehicles that have no end of fund life or infrastructure funds that are typically 11 to 13 years, our management fees, our revenues are actually longer than a fiber company. They're same, if not longer, than a data center operator.
And our weighted average tenor, believe it or not, is actually longer than most of the public tower companies. So if you pull it back and you look at DigitalBridge as a digital infrastructure owner and operator, we have the most durable and steady revenue streams, and we have a higher concentration of investment-grade revenues because guess where our revenues come from? Sovereign wealth funds and pension funds around the world and insurance companies. So we have investment-grade counterparties that anchor our earnings. And, you know, at the end of the day, whether it's Tower Cash Flow, NOI, or an R-metric FRE where I'm gauged against Blackstone and KKR, my FRE growth is 23% year- over- year. Okay? That's not what American Tower and Digital Realty and Cogent are doing. I can assure you of that.
So if you put us in that ecosystem and you put us in that prism, no one's growing faster with the durability and the cadence that DigitalBridge is growing, and nobody has a front-row seat to all of the opportunities, not just one swim lane. So we've got to get out there and we've got to tell that story with a little more precision because when you frame it that way, if you don't own DigitalBridge in your digital infrastructure portfolio, you're missing a huge part of the opportunity. And so that's why I'm in New York today. That's why I'm sitting with you is so we can have that conversation and we can bring the relevance of what's happening to the forefront. And investors have to make a decision. They have to choose. They have to decide where they're going to put their capital.
My bet is, I want to be diversified. I'd also want a seat at the table around power because power is changing just as fast as digital infrastructure is changing. The power industry is changing and we're rewriting some of those rules.
You know, the thing you mentioned is just the quantum of CapEx and capital that's going to get put in the ground. I think the thing that surprises me the most is how much of the capital is coming from private sources versus public. When I look at, you know, our last 30 years of covering these industries, is that sustainable? And, you know, how do you look at your opportunity to go after these private investment opportunities?
Look, for us, you know, we have to recycle capital. I mean, that's really important. Again, I'm not picking on Steve. He talked about his dividend as the way he recycles his capital. He pushes his money back to his constituents. We do the same thing. We've returned over $9 billion of capital to investors in the last two years. That's called DPI. At the same time, we've raised tens of billions of capital. What's interesting is as I return $10 billion, I'm generally tacking on another $20 million-$25 million of AUM every year. As you know, out of the quarter, we were at $106 billion of assets under management, which actually, if you gauge Crown, American, and Digital Realty and Equinix on that metric, we would be the biggest by a wide margin. Again, we're growing that AUM by about 20% per year.
To do that, you've got to form capital. But the key to private capital markets is the return of capital. And we said that last year in our earnings presentation, we put a little more focus on DPI. And look, for public shareholders, DPI is not very popular because you lose management fees. You take a step back. And there was a moment in time last year in fourth quarter where we took a little step back. But guess what? In the last, you know, in third quarter last year, but in fourth quarter, first quarter, and second quarter, what we've done is we've taken many steps forward. So sometimes in our business, you return the capital and that opens the door and widens the aperture to go raise more capital.
The consequence of having two years of good DPI was it really enabled us to grow our private credit business, which I'm really excited about. It enabled us to go into the power business, which we talked about last quarter. It enabled us to go out and raise more capital in our third flagship fund, which is performing extremely well. And so I think for us, you know, private capital for DigitalBridge will remain open, provided that we're on this normal cadence of kind of two steps forward, one step back, or you could say one step back, two steps forward, depending on how you look at it. But allocators, we know two things. When I walk into a meeting with an allocator, I know two things that are absolutely true. One, they're underexposed to alts, like flat-out insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds.
We know the minute I walk in a door to pitch them about DigitalBridge, we know they're underexposed to private alternative assets. The second thing we know is they are underexposed to digital infrastructure. And so I walk in with a big advantage when I'm asking for a pension or a sovereign or an insurance company or a family office to give us capital, which is we know right away that as they are reshaping their global portfolio away from private equity, away from real estate, where are they filling those holes? Digital, power, infrastructure, alts. Those are all very safe swim lanes for us to grow. So we have a couple of things going really well for us, which is we're returning capital.
We know allocators are underallocated to what we do, and we know our story is incredibly unique and differentiated, and there's not even a close second place in terms of AUM, in terms of a specific digital infrastructure manager like us. So we got to take that lead. We've got to grow it. We've got to press our competitive advantage. And then we have to press on our comparative advantage, which is this cross-polarization of our portfolio companies. When a customer says, "Hey, we have a really complicated build, and we really need you to address, you know, this compute capacity. We need X amount of pairs of dark fiber. We need redundancy. And oh, by the way, we need interconnection." And we can say, "No problem.
We've got all three." Or like in the State of Louisiana where they said, "We have this opportunity and we have this big grant, but it requires towers and fiber." So what did we do? We showed up with Vertical Bridge and say, "Oh, we won. Nobody else could address the RFP." We have this enormous flexibility, Michael, to go anywhere, show up and manifest ourselves in a way that is different and differentiated from a DLR or an American Tower or a Blackstone or a KKR. That's really the uniqueness of the brand and the power of what we've built in the last 12 years.
You know, you mentioned earlier the 23% FRE growth. When you look at the growth of the assets that you're investing in, can you give us a portfolio update in terms of what you're seeing?
Yeah. Well, as we say, you try to love all your children the same, but of course you can't. You have to love some children a little more than others. Let's take data centers as a good place to start. Data center growth has been fantastic. If you looked across the nine different platforms we owned, all of them are growing double-digit. Most of them are growing greater than 20%. So this is really a unique moment in time. We highlighted it on our last quarterly call just around the depth of our pipeline. If you look at the year-over-year growth in our bookings and our pipeline, both those metrics are greater than 50%. That's stunning. Not even in the heyday of towers did you see that kind of growth.
So, you know, our backlog today across our nine different platforms is over nine gigawatts of opportunity in terms of, you know, whether it's an inquiry, a lease application, or a draft lease, or a lease that's about to be signed. And if you go back a year ago, that pipeline was at about five gigawatts. So we are really seeing an enormous explosion in opportunity. Now, once you get through that opportunity, you've got to parse it, right? Private cloud, public cloud, large language model training, inferencing. All of this stuff is so specific. And the ability to have our platform show up with that specificity. So if I have a big sovereign cloud opportunity, you know where it's going? It's going to Switch. Tier 5, highly secure, and really the inventor of private cloud. You know, if it's a big hyperscale opportunity in the U.S.
And a customer says, "We need a 1 GW, you know, giga campus to be built." We tap Sureel in Vantage. And you saw that a couple of weeks ago with the press release about what they're doing in Texas. And, you know, Vantage is just a juggernaut in terms of its capabilities and what it can do for the hyperscalers. And then the stuff that Raul's doing at DataBank is incredible. He actually has the fastest five-year CAGR growth of all of our portfolio companies. He's been averaging 25% CAGR growth for five years. And all, again, I hope Steve doesn't think I'm picking on him. Edge compute is going like crazy, actually. It just happens at DataBank, we have a lot of capital and we can move faster.
So what's happening at the edge right now is these kind of 10 MW- 60 MW mini campuses where you're, you know, initially you're seeing the proliferation of edge cloud or edge applications. But now what's happening is inferencing. And so instead of, you know, an inferencing workload is very different from a large language model workload. And those workloads are between 5 MW and 60 MW. But the ability to have a tethered solution where you're not sitting in a NAP, in a downtown NAP, but you're outside in Plano, Texas, or you're in Overland Park, Kansas, or you're in Bluffdale, Utah, where we have between 50 MW- 100 , we can show up and we can deliver that inferencing workload for Groq, for example, in Houston, in The Woodlands, and deploy for them very quickly because we know what they need. What do they need?
They need interconnection. They need multi-path fiber, you know, paths. They need sort of not too diverse paths. They need four diverse paths. They don't need two pairs of dark fiber. They need 28 to 56. And our ability to show up with interconnection fiber in the facilities is why Groq uses us. It's why CoreWeave uses us. It's why NVIDIA uses DataBank. DataBank's ability to deliver, you know, 80 unique locations in 29 markets is actually a bigger portfolio footprint than Equinix. And what it has that Equinix doesn't have is it has that tethered solution and it has capital. And it has capital to go fast. And so the edge is happening. Sorry, Steve Vondran, but it's happening. And if you're not involved in it, you're going to miss it.
Because right now we're building those public cloud workloads on the edge, but now we're building those inferencing workloads, and Steve did touch on a little bit about machine-to-machine connectivity. That's where inferencing really hits and connects with the mobile network. And that's where we get really excited about towers. So data centers are going quite well. Again, if you're focused on public cloud, private cloud, the hyperscale, large language models and inferencing, and edge, if you've really tethered across those opportunities, you're going to see a lot of high growth. I think in fiber, it's kind of the tale of sort of three cities, right? Which is maybe even four cities, I would offer to you. Start with the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is what's working right now. We really like this idea of building a backbone to multifamily. We call the MDU space.
We have two investments that do that really well. We have one in Europe called Netomnia. We have another one called FiberNow in South Florida. 10-year contracts, 15-year contracts with HOAs. You take no execution risk in the subs. You have 100% penetration day one. We like businesses that are infrastructure-like. When you have those MDU businesses, it's different than competing with the cable company because you have the exclusivity with the landlord and you can go fast. You know, RESI Fiber, we just made an announcement in WideOpenWest, so we do believe in that story. We believe in cable plant, transforming it into broadband plant. But you got to do it at like four to five times EBITDA. You can't do it at 16 to 18 times. You're just too far behind the curve.
So I would say that's not the bad, but if you buy it wrong, it can be very bad. If you buy it right, it can be very good. So I think we're very price disciplined around residential fiber. The other two pieces of the ecosystem are really enterprise fiber and what I call, you know, true infrastructure transport. You know, the commercial side has been fine. Enterprise has been good at Zayo. Bookings have been steady at 4%-5%. Churn has been under 200 basis points. So you're a net 3%-4% grower. It's not terribly sexy, but it works. Cogent's a good example of that. If you've got a great sales team, you've got people tethered to the buildings and you can really penetrate, you can achieve good growth rates. I think the area that's working the best in fiber today is transport.
You know, traditional infrastructure, which is fiber to AI, fiber to inferencing, fiber to data centers, long-haul transport routes where you're connecting two NAPs. Like, we have a couple of routes, new routes at Zayo that are performing really well. Those are great because we're getting 15- to 30-year commitments from our customers. And most of those builds are happening at where our customers are putting up 50% of the CapEx. We're taking very little execution risk. And the paybacks are now back to inside of 36 months. Now, go back, you know, six, seven, eight years ago before we bought Zayo and Caruso was talking about paybacks inside of 10 years. That just doesn't work. Those were bad ideas. So we're making our customers pick up 50% of the CapEx. We're very disciplined for paybacks inside of 48 months. We're now seeing those paybacks inside of 36 months.
What's more important is we're getting the second and third carrier on those routes a lot faster. So, you know, you look at routes, you know, for example, like Northern Virginia to Dublin, Ohio, or you look at Atlanta, Georgia to the InfoMart in Dallas. You look at, you know, One Wilshire all the way up to MAE- West and extended into Beaverton and Seattle where we built new routes. We're now on to the six or seven tenant on those routes because we built those not with 12 pairs, not with 24 pairs. We're building them with, you know, 412, 524, I mean, high, high, high pair routes. A lot of dark fiber. So that you think about these things.
I know Jay Brown always used to say, "Think of fiber as a tower put on its side." Well, if you only have two to four pairs of dark fiber, there's not a lot of, you know, data centers for you to colocate to. But if you have 500 pairs of fiber, the transport business is really good. So we're seeing extraordinary returns right now at Zayo in terms of our transport bookings. So we're very excited about that. So fiber is a little bit of a kind of a mixed bag, but you really, as an investor, you have to think carefully about where you're investing. And then the last place that I'll go to is mobile infrastructure.
In mobile infrastructure here in the U.S., it's been, I think I said this to one of your competitors' conferences a few weeks ago in Utah, I haven't seen leasing like this in 13 years, to be precise. We see, as Steve said, this is the first quarter at Vertical Bridge, our U.S. cell tower, where colos outnumbered amendments for the first time since 2013. So we've been very patient. We've waited 12 to 13 years, and now colos are back. And you have to ask yourself, as a guy who understands RF engineering, why is that happening? It's happening because of the amount of pressure on the device. When you think about applications and you think about AI, it's putting enormous downward pressure on the network. Now, history lesson. We go back to 2013 and why was that happening?
It was happening because public cloud was being introduced to wireless devices. So mobile data traffic moved from 2011 to 2015 up 10x. That's just hard empirical data. That's a fact. In the last six months, I've heard Jensen and I've heard Masayoshi say the same thing, which is they believe mobile data traffic will increase 3x to 5x . And the carrier's behavior is manifesting that self. And so all three bands are being tested. And you were talking about the AT&T merger. We can talk about that in a second. But we see 14% organic growth in U.S. towers this year so far. And the amount of colos that the customers are wanting is because of, you know, carriers don't like the word densification, but it is densification. It's the network.
As you turn up more capacity, you create holes in the network and you got to fill in those holes, and so we're seeing a lot of that. And we've had really incredible leasing, huge demand in BTS. Our BTS backlog in the U.S. is up over now 5,000 towers. We have agreements in place with all three customers. We're the preferred partner to Verizon. We're a preferred provider to AT&T and T-Mobile. And there's not a single tower company in the world that's building 1,000 plus towers in the U.S. other than us, so advantage us. I think last year when you accumulated SBA Crown and American, they built 200 towers. We're building 5x with the three of them combined are building. And this is a great DigitalBridge investment. We're very bullish on U.S. towers. I believe the fastest growth area in AI will be machine-to-machine connectivity.
Because once machines start talking to each other, there's no off switch. We can always turn our phones off. We can turn an application off. The minute you have an IoT sensor talking to Tesla's mainframe, that's a conversation. The minute you have public safety, interagency conversations where the devices are talking to each other for early detection, those large language models are powerful and they're building. Every day they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We know this from Switch because of some of the data sovereignty work that they're doing for the U.S. government. This is a huge opportunity. I don't think people are thinking about it correctly. Vondran was correct. The demand for towers over the next decade is going to amplify. And if the FCC doesn't move on spectrum, it's completely the advantage of the tower operator.
And our ability to keep building is a huge advantage for Vertical Bridge. We got to keep introducing new locations. Having these 7,000 Verizon towers is really helpful. We just moved to being the number three operator in the U.S. We just passed SBA in terms of tower capacity and tower locations. So I'm naturally a tower guy, so I'm always bullish. I feel like I'm the cheerleader for the tower industry. But this is a moment in time where you really have to get excited about what's happening in mobile infrastructure. And small cells are coming back. We've seen renewed interest in small cells. It may not be the small cell you used to know. You got to be thinking in multi-architecture like mini macros, smaller nodes with one antenna and one RRU. Our customers are getting a lot more creative.
This notion that a small cell looks like that, that's not true. Small cells are taking different forms. We've seen explosive growth at Boingo. Boingo keeps signing up new deals, has a great opportunity with the U.S. military. We have all the U.S. military bases for fiber and Wi-Fi. And we see small cells coming back in 2026, 2027, and 2028. I know it's kind of a bit of a dirty word in mobile infrastructure parlance, but carriers need it. They need that solution and they need macros as well. So this is, I'm not going to tell you it's the golden era of like 1996 of towers, but there's this whole new investment cycle coming into towers right now, and I think investors underappreciate it.
So you mentioned the leasing at Vertical Bridge. You know, the tower companies have been talking about leasing getting better as well.
And I think what's happened, you know, over the last couple of weeks is with the possibility of carriers getting spectrum where they could just like plug and play it, you know, and it's some spectrum. But there's a concern that's risen that maybe this then slows that densification ramp or pushes it out a few years because, you know, in the formula of capacity, they can use spectrum, they can use cell sites, they could use technology, and here you're amping up that potentially that spectrum factor. So is that something that at least could put, you know, put the brakes on or, you know, hit a speed bump in terms of like this multi-year path?
Or do you think, you know, just given what you're seeing in the near and the medium term, you know, the spectrum, you know, maybe reshuffle is not going to be significant for tower leasing?
Well, I think, look, first of all, each carrier has a very different spectrum position. So I think what we've always prided ourselves in is having very specific conversations with specific customers. So our big three customers here in the U.S. want very different things. It's the same thing in Germany. We have the largest tower portfolio in Germany, and we've had 8% organic growth there, which is almost double what Cellnex has. And people go, "Why is that happening?" And I said, "Well, we have great locations.
We have towers that are really big, and we also now really acutely understand the problem of Telefónica, Vodafone, and Drillisch . Having these very detailed conversations with your customers where you're trusted and you're not perceived as the enemy because of 30 years of bad MLA negotiations is a real advantage right now. So again, when you walk in the room, advantage DigitalBridge. Why? We don't have the taint of having these multi-generational MLAs and SLAs that a Cellnex may have or, you know, Steve may have or Crown or SBA may have. And so I'm having these conversations with customers. Our CEOs are, they're incredibly direct. And what I would tell you is you've hit the nail on the head. I think they are concerned about spectrum because some of them have them, some of them don't.
Even T-Mobile, that's very spectrum rich, is very active right now, extremely active, because their network needs to get stronger as they've added more subs. But when you have this paradigm where you add new subs, new devices, and a completely new frame of reference from a technology perspective, which is AI, T-Mobile's network needs help. AT&T's network needs help, which is why they went out and they got DISH, and Verizon still needs help. You know, Hans and Lynn Cox are busy. They're building, and Kyle, and they have a great network. They have a network advantage. But the way Hans thinks and Kyle thinks is they're always saying, "I want to be ahead. I want to be one step ahead." That's the mentality of Verizon. They're always planning ahead, so all these carriers are very different, Michael.
But I think they are thinking about how are they deploying their O-RAN or C-RAN. Most of them are C-RAN now. And they're thinking also about how do they deploy that radio technology at the edge? How do they interface to interconnection? How do they take more revenue from the hyperscalers this time around? Because I think they feel like they got, they didn't get the full value of the bargain in cloud. I think they will get the full value of the bargain in AI. And at the same time, they're counterbalancing that with their spectrum needs and ultimately their site needs. I see all three carriers for the first time in the U.S. as being healthy, well capitalized, and growing. And they're growing ARPU for the first time in a decade. Those are really good healthy metrics. Now, how do they keep doing that?
They do it through the network. They do it by having network advantage and keeping customers loyal, and as we all know, we're on our devices. We're on our mobile devices. Someone said recently, like 60% of the day. I find that really hard to believe. That's not me, but we do really, we are very tethered to our mobile devices in more ways than not, and the last thing I would say about towers that gives me a lot of optimism is, remember, Michael, today we'll finish 2025 with 30 billion connected devices. That's up from 26 billion last year. Most people don't know that we're going to 59 billion connected devices by 2033. So imagine if today we have 30 billion devices and you're doubling that. What do you think has to happen in the network? Spectrum only gets you so far. C-RAN only gets you so far.
At the end of the day, it is physics. There is a physicality to how radio spectrum waves propagate, and those propagation characteristics define ultimately how the radio works. I'm trying to distill this at a very simple level, and that's why we have a lot of optimism around towers.
Very helpful. I want to go back to the data center conversation, the power conversation. You talked about your pipeline going from $5 billion-$9 billion. How do we think about the win rate for your portfolio companies and, you know, the annual opportunity to turn that pipeline into bookings and revenue?
Well, I think, look, this year, you know, our global footprint, you know, when we looked at the 5 GW last year, we converted about 1.9 GW globally. So we felt pretty good about that. That's a good win ratio. That's a 40% win ratio.
I look at our pipelines that have nine gigawatts. You know, I think it's not totally unrealistic when you own companies like Vantage and Switch and Scala. I mean, and DataBank, these are big companies that are effectively their business plans are measured in gigawatts now. So we'd like to get that 40% win ratio. I mean, it'd be great if we could do another four to 5 GW of bookings this year. Not sure where we'll land. But if we did land at four to five gigawatts of booking, it would be multiples higher than Equinix and DLR. What it took to win today versus what it took to win six years ago has completely changed, and I think our having those nine companies that can be very surgical in those conversations and go for those wins is really important, but at the end of the day, it's power.
You know, do you have the land? Do you have the entitlements? Do you have the power? And it's not good enough to say you have a will serve letter. What's your connection date? And what's your certainty on that connection date? Customers are really sophisticated. They have massive power teams. Google, Meta, you know, Oracle Now, Amazon, Microsoft, all these guys have huge dedicated teams, hundreds of people thinking about power. The same way we do. We have a huge team that wakes up every day and thinks about power. And so we're trying to get out ahead. We said on our call, we have a 22 GW power bank. It's big. That's the biggest power bank of any data center operator in the world. We'll lease through that power bank, you know, easily in the next five years. Easily.
Now the question is, how do I keep building more power and how do I bring more power online? And there's a couple of ways we can do that. We can build power adjacent to our substation through a microgrid, tether that to our substation, and supplement the grid power with external power. We're doing that very successfully. And then what we do is we sell that power through to our customers on much like a tower lease or a data center lease. It looks like a 10 to 15-year PPA. It's a power purchase agreement.
Then, you know, as we think about new sites and we go out into communities and the power company says, "Yeah, look, we have no power left for you." We say, "Well, what if we brought our own power and we turn that power up and then during peak hours we sell some power to you and off peak we bring it back and we buy from you between 1:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M.?" We're starting to learn how to trade power for the first time. So we have two active microgrids, one in Brazil and one in the U.S. that we built ourselves. We're actually trading in the power. In fact, in Brazil, we sell power to our competitors. I sell power to DLR and Equinix. No problem. I'm happy to sell power to my friends. We make money off that.
What we're finding is the returns in these microgrids and these independent, you know, generation capabilities that we possess are producing similar, if not better returns in data centers. I never expected that. But now we know how the utility companies make their money. They trade power all day long. So we've figured that out. We understand now how to actively trade power. We have excess power. I think the key part of the conversation point that a lot of people aren't talking about that I've been saying for the last two years is you have to go back to FERC and you have to look at baseload. And you have to look at the different grids in the U.S. and you have to see where we have grid imbalance.
And the fact, for example, that, you know, take for example what happened at Susquehanna, FERC came in and shut down Amazon for that 800 MW. Amazon only got to that first 100 MW of nuke power. Why? Nobody did a baseload study. Nobody figured out why that nuclear power plant, how much baseload it gave to the Mid-Atlantic. You have to do that work. So for example, when we go to a place like Reno and we have a massive microgrid there serving the SUPERNAP of Switch, we're actually a net contributor to the grid in that microgrid. So I'm putting power back into baseload. And when you start putting power back into baseload, your conversation with FERC changes really fast. They don't look at you as the enemy. They look at you as actually helping solve the problem. That's what we're doing at DigitalBridge.
We've got a massive pipeline of power projects. We're super excited. We announced our first power project with ArcLight. We have other projects that we're going to bring to the market shortly. They're great guys. They're like the DigitalBridge of power. All they've been doing for 30 years is building power. And so we've, again, we've gone back to our old roots, which is go back to the drawing board. Go build something. Go solve the problem. And by the way, it's okay to use solar. It's okay to use wind. It's okay to use hydro. I know it's not super chic to be talking about green power, but look, those power sources are abundant. They're adjacent to where we have microgrids. And when we can be a good corporate citizen, we're going to do that. We're going to make the right decision.
We're going to make the right decision around water in terms of what we're doing with our recirculating cooling capabilities, with our liquid cooling that we're doing at Switch at Evo. That Evo capability is stunning. I mean, Jensen said it best, Mike Intrator said it best. He did his entire IPO roadshow in a Switch data center. When you see the ability to not waste one drop of water and you bring cooling at the level that we can do at Switch, which is the preferred location for the Blackwell chip for NVIDIA, it's the preferred location for CoreWeave. That's comparative advantage. When you have an engineering capability where you can not only perform for your customer, but you can perform for the planet, I know that sounds a little folksy in today's environment, but I'm going to stand by that.
I'm going to stand by my conviction that we have to be thinking long and hard about power and water.
Mark, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you.
Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it.
Thanks.