Spanish AI company Substrate AI has established a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT, known as a SOCIMI in Spain) with the aim of promoting the development of assets related to artificial intelligence, as part of a strategy that will channel investment into critical infrastructure such as data centers, technology campuses, and other facilities specializing in high-performance computing.

REITs are companies that own, and often operate, income-producing real estate such as data centers. They act as a fund for investors, generating revenue via leasing space and collecting rent on their properties. Data center REITs are investment trusts where all or the majority of the trust’s revenues come from leasing data centers.

The new company was created as a vehicle to finance and manage the real estate assets on which the company will base its growth strategy in digital infrastructure, in a context marked by a sharp increase in demand for capacity for generative AI applications and advanced computing.

Owned by Subgen AI, Substrate AI is a Spanish AI and cloud company. The firm has previously announced plans to build a data center outside Toledo.

Substrate’s Serenity Cloud currently offers services from six regions: Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo, Singapore, US East, and US West, according to company documentation.

The company said the SOCIMI will allow for the separation of ownership of real estate assets from the group’s technology operations, facilitating the onboarding of new investors and access to financing for future projects.

“With this step, we are launching, through a real estate vehicle, the deployment of Substrate AI’s infrastructure, with Talavera de la Reina as our flagship project. This infrastructure will support our clients with a focus on the sale of tokens generated by our Orion LLMs, rather than the sale of computing hours, which we believe adds no value and is increasingly becoming a commodity,” said Lorenzo Serratosa, CEO of Substrate AI.

This model, widely used in other real estate segments, is also gaining traction in the data center sector due to the high volume of capital required for these types of developments and the growing interest of institutional investors in assets associated with the digital economy.

While many of the major data center firms operate as REITs themselves, many have also spun off publicly listed REITs that own stakes in their stabilized assets. Digital Realty, GDS, PLDT, and NTT have previously done this, and Blackstone-owned AirTrunk is reportedly pursuing a similar move. Blackstone is also setting up its own data center REIT.

This piece was automatically translated from DCD’s Spanish site and edited by a member of DCD staff.