Towers are the digital infrastructure that make modern connectivity possible. As demand for wireless connectivity surges, towers are becoming more valuable, while at the same time an increasing number of “gadgets” are being added to tower sites to serve the needs of proliferating digitally-enabled services.

In this episode of Cool Vector, David Snow chatted with Omar Jaffrey, Founder and Managing Partner of Palistar; David Bacino, CEO of Symphony Towers; Yannis Macheras, CEO of Harmony Towers; and Andrej Danis, TMT Partner at AlixPartners to unpack why tower infrastructure is an increasingly relevant asset class and some of the most durable assets in digital infrastructure. Highlights from the discussion include: • Why communication towers function as highly defensible assets, with zoning and permitting creating natural barriers to entry that favor collocation over duplication; once built, adding a second or third tenant is far easier than approving a new tower next door. • How the tower business has shifted from carrier-owned “tower farms” to independent infrastructure providers, allowing mobile network operators to redirect capital toward network upgrades rather than steel in the ground. • Why scale matters: owning or operating thousands of sites dramatically improves operating efficiency and unlocks EBITDA growth that smaller portfolios simply can’t achieve. • How disciplined site selection determines whether a tower becomes a long-term cash-flow engine or a missed opportunity. • Why demand is expanding beyond the big mobile carriers, as new entrants like fixed wireless providers, connected vehicles, aviation connectivity, and IoT platforms increasingly rely on zoned communication sites. • How towers are becoming a core piece of long-duration infrastructure portfolios, valued for their durability, predictable cash flows, REIT-friendly structures, and resilience through economic cycles. As device counts grow from millions to tens of billions, towers remain the physical backbone of the wireless revolution.

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GPUs versus TPUs, depreciating GPUs and data centers that may never be built - Cool Vector experts take you inside the issues causing the most uncertainty in the global data center market.

A year ago, TD Cowan's Michael Elias roiled the data center world when he reported Microsoft was pulling back from some of its projects. Today, a "winner take most" urgency continues to drive the market, but hyperscalers increasingly are aware that what is being built today may not be optimized for the compute needs of tomorrow.

In "Inside the 'Winner Take Most' Hyperscaler Battle," Cool Vector's David Snow speaks with Elias, the Director of Equity Research for Communications Infrastructure at TD Cowen, Eli Scher, Managing Partner at United Integrity Advisors, and Phillip Koblence a Cool Vector editorial director, as well as COO of NYI, CEO of Critical Ventures, UIA and a co-founder of Nomad Futurist. Among the takeaways of this lively conversation:

• Why Microsoft’s pullback was less a demand collapse than a pipeline triage. What initially appeared to be a hyperscaler retreat was in fact a selective pruning of under-deliverable projects, coinciding with workload redistribution toward partners such as Oracle and CoreWeave. “They went through and they culled the pipeline and removed the stuff that didn’t make sense," says Scher.

• Why forecasted compute demand continues to be impossible to keep up with, and why some data center developers will get "a bit over their skiis" along the way, says Elias.

• The entrance of "GPU on demand" players like CoreWeave is confusing some market observers as to the ultimate source of demand, causing some to wonder, "Who's workload is it anyway?"

• Depreciation schedules of data center assets are central to business models, but no one knows the true life of new GPU chips. One problem, say our experts, is that GPUs are designed to run parallel workloads, but actual future workload needs may end up being more focused, making chips like Google's TPUs a more cost-effective solution.

• Why GPU deployment is pushing the "upper bounds" of data center infrastructure.

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The future of the digital infrastructure asset class can be seen in the history of the real estate asset class, experts from PREA and Five Point Infrastructure tell Cool Vector.

A mountain of institutional capital is eyeing data centers, but investors - including US pension funds - can often spend years studying a new asset class before beginning to allocate to it. Real estate is a good example of this journey from a niche opportunity, deemed uninvestable by institutional capital, to an enormous, universally embraced, mature asset class.

Cool Vector spoke with two institutional investment experts to better understand the current view of data centers among institutional real estate investors, and what the future may hold for digital infrastructure in the institutional portfolio.

This fascinating conversation between Greg MacKinnon, Director of Research at Pension Real Estate Association (PREA) and Jeff Eaton, a Partner at Five Point Infrastructure, covers topics of interest to anyone seeking to better understand the increasing partnership between private capital and data centers. Among the key takeaways:

• Institutional investors are just beginning the learning curve on data centers—just like they once did with real estate. Despite massive interest, pensions and endowments are still figuring out which allocation "bucket" data centers belong in, and how to underwrite them—a process similar to how real estate entered institutional allocations in the 1970s. “Everyone's learning about it, but it takes a while for an institutional investor to get to a point where they can actually sort of put capital to work," says MacKinnon.

• Institutional investors—especially public pensions—move slowly and cautiously when adopting a new category, but once it's approved, that category can rapidly grow to become a core portfolio component. "They have to go through a rigorous allocation process, which can take six months, a year, a year and a half, especially if you're a sovereign wealth fund or a public pension fund," says Eaton.

• Greenfield data center projects offer high returns, but carry risk many investors are not yet equipped to manage. “That just causes an institutional investor to have to do even more work: Is it worth the extra three or 400 basis points for this extra risk that I'm taking?" asks Eaton.

• Data center demand is creating new adjacent investment themes—especially around energy infrastructure. “Even if you've allocated to data centers before, there's going to be other opportunities for you to get decent returns by having derivative exposure to the data center asset class," says Eaton.

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#coolvector #digitalinfrastructure #datacenter #datacenters #realestate #cre