Data centers reshape real estate as banks struggle with funding

For decades, global real estate revolved around what could be seen — gleaming office towers, shopping malls, and trophy hotels, but that has increasingly shifted to "invisible" property: cloud and data centers.

"The world of real estate is changing from what I'd call the 'visible' to the 'invisible,'" said Kishore Moorjani, CEO of CapitaLand Investment's alternatives and private funds team.

"[It's] everything we can't see but we use: the cloud, as we like calling it, lives in the data center," he noted during a panel at the Milken Institute Asia Summit held in Singapore. "That's what's driving the value shift."

According to a recent 2025 data center investor interest survey by real estate services firm CBRE, 95% of major investors worldwide plan to increase their investments in data c