THE rise of the digital economy and the acceleration of digitalisation thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic have resulted in increased demand for data centres. But the investment premise for data centre assets is under attack.

Late last month, US-based hedge fund manager and short seller Jim Chanos revealed he is raising money for a fund that will short real estate investment trusts (Reits) listed in the United States. In particular, Chanos expects to make money as the prices of data centre Reits falls.

In an interview with Financial Times, Chanos said data centre Reits face “technical obsolescence” because their 3 biggest customers — the Big 3 cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure — are also their 3 biggest competitors.