Prologis: development and data bets

Prologis used its first-quarter report on April 16 to show the two businesses investors are measuring now: warehouses that are leasing again and data centers that are getting bigger. (ir.prologis.com) The San Francisco real estate investment trust said it signed a record 64 million square feet of logistics leases in the quarter and kept period-end occupancy at 95.3%. Core funds from operations were $1.50 a share, up from $1.42 a year earlier. (ir.prologis.com) Prologis also started $1.783 billion of new development in the quarter, and 81.2% of those starts were build-to-suit projects, meaning space preplanned for a specific customer. The company said it advanced its data center platform with $1.3 billion of build-to-suit development starts. (ir.prologis.com) That matters because Prologis is still, first, a warehouse landlord on a huge scale: it lists $230 billion of assets under management, 1.3 billion square feet, 5,882 buildings and 6,500 customers across 20 countries. Its industrial occupancy and leasing volumes are the basic gauges investors use to judge whether demand is firming after a slower stretch in logistics real estate. (ir.prologis.com) The second gauge is how much of the next development cycle shifts into digital infrastructure. Ahead of earnings, analysts said Prologis was planning $4 billion to $5 billion of development starts in 2026, with about 40% tied to data centers, while BTIG kept a buy rating and lifted its price target to $155 from $134 in January. (finance.yahoo.com) (ng.investing.com) Prologis spent 2025 building the case for that shift. It reported a company-record 228 million square feet of leases signed last year and said it had expanded data center power capacity to 5.7 gigawatts. (ir.prologis.com) Power is the bottleneck in data centers, and Prologis is pitching land near dense population and freight corridors as an advantage. Commercial Observer reported in January that the company controls roughly 14,000 acres for data center and energy-related development. (commercialobserver.com) Prologis is also lining up outside capital as the buildout gets larger. In March it formed a $1.6 billion United States build-to-suit logistics joint venture with GIC, and on April 9 it announced a pan-European logistics joint venture with La Caisse. (ir.prologis.com) The next test is whether leasing stays strong enough to hold occupancy near 95% while data center starts move from pipeline to signed projects. Thursday’s report gave investors both numbers in the same release, which is why Prologis is being read as a warehouse cycle story and a data center financing story at once. (ir.prologis.com)