Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE:DLR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And so I really think it’s a by-product of us engaging showing up differently. The new logo engagement, I think, overall has been particularly strong we did 134 new logos last quarter. So on the enterprise side, on the whole, I think we’ve seen pretty strong interest pipeline and then execution on the whole.

Christopher Sharp: Right. And one thing I’d like to spread a bit more detail on the equipment. With the offering that we launched last year around the high-density colo in anticipation of a lot of private AI type of deployment coming to market. A part of that program is not only that the 32 markets and three regions being able to do 70 kilowatts a rack. What we’re really doing is pre-buying a lot of the technology to support that power density to allow our customers to deploy in a very timely fashion, but also expedites a bit of that higher end kind of new AI capability coming to market.

Operator: The next question comes from Matt Niknam with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Matthew Niknam: Hey, thank you for taking the question. Financial question. So with leverage now back under six turns on a pro forma basis, how do you now think about the dividend and potential forward growth relative to incremental investments in the business and/or potential M&A? Thanks.

Andrew Power: Thanks, Matt. So multi fast, I’m going to hand to Matt to explain how the dividend call works in terms of taxable income and distribution and why the dividend is set where it is set. Because I think the topic of M&A, I mean, you could look at the linear press releases or just recent events we’ve done in just the last several months through resolving our relationship to Cyxtera to growing our platform in India with the addition of Reliance Jio. We also just had a big announcement with the leader in the GPU space recently to disposing of some noncore assets, JVs stabilized assets and adding strategically to our landholdings across key markets. So we’ve been incredibly active on pieces of that. I think the broader context of M&A, I think the most critical puzzle pieces have kind of been picked over.

And most of our activity from here are really, call it, extending our strategic advantages and bolt-on in nature to what we have. I don’t see any like key gems out there that would be really additive to our global platform at peak. Matt, why don’t you hit on the dividend, Matt, if you want that.

Matthew Mercier: Sure. I mean, similar to what we’ve talked about in ’23, I mean, there’s two major components in terms of the dividend and related to taxable income. There’s our ordinary income that we get from operations, and then there’s also the income that’s generated from transactions and the related gains that we have from executing those, which we had a sizable amount of the ’23. Now we’re looking at less transaction size in ’24, but as you saw in the guidance, you talked about $1 billion to $1.5 billion. So we expect that there’ll still be related income from that, and we still have cash flow even after dividend and we think we’ll be able to support where we are. And ultimately, our goal and target is that we grow the dividend as AFFO and as our cash flow grows, which we expect we’ll start to see over the long term related to the growth algorithm that I talked about earlier.

Operator: The next question comes from Simon Flannery with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Simon Flannery: Great. Thanks very much. Good evening. I wanted to just talk about the mix between the 0 to 1 and the greater than 1 megawatt. It looks like you had almost 50% coming from 0 to 1 plus interconnection. That’s been gradually rising over the last few quarters. So how do we think about this going forward? Your focus on — should that mix trend higher than the 50-50? Or is it going to be jumping around as it has done in the past? Thanks.

Andrew Power: Thanks, Simon. So one of our top, top, top priorities is to continue to focus on delivering acceleration in that 0 to 1 megawatt interconnection cohort, enterprise connectivity in order to customers, the most granular and the largest volume of over 5,000 customers as well as our new logos. So by and large, the more quarters where that represents a larger and increasing piece of the mix and continues to accelerate like it has done recently, that is filling our existing baking capacity. It’s wins at our highest rates, it’s multi-market, multi-geo enterprise customers and is the place where we believe we can deliver the greatest value to our customers, most consistently and long-term and durable there will be episodic quarters where that will be a lower percentage.

But that’s likely enough because we’ve filtered our execution. That’s likely because we also are supporting some of the largest hyperscalers around the world. We’re bringing our capacity in over half of our 50-plus metropolitan areas, places where we can really add value to those customers where they’ve already landed their compute or AZs where they want to grow at our continuous capacity with operational excellence, where we have that long runway of growth that they can get from no one else. And those are we quarters where we saw larger lumpier deals, obviously, into those capacity blocks. So we think both of these are large addressable markets where we have a distinct value proposition and a competitive moat that we’ll continue to focus on executing each and every day.