DigitalBridge Group, Inc.

DigitalBridge Group, Inc.

DBRG·NYSE

$15.67

+0.032%
Financial ServicesAsset Management

DigitalBridge (NYSE: DBRG) is an infrastructure investment firm. It specializes in investing and operating businesses across the digital ecosystem including cell towers, data centers, fiber, small cells, edge infrastructure, digital infrastructure and real estate. DigitalBridge Group, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida with additional offices in Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; Boston, Massachusetts; Denver, Colorado; London, United Kingdom; Senningerberg, Luxembourg and Singapore.

At a Glance

Live Snapshot
Market Cap$2.86B
EPS0.4600
P/E Ratio34.07
Earnings Date08/06/2026

Earnings Call Transcript

DBRG • 2025 • Q1

Operator
Greetings, and welcome to the DigitalBridge Group First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Severin White. Please go ahead.
Severin White
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Marc Ganzi, our CEO, and Tom Mayrhofer, our CFO. I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today May 1, 2025, and DigitalBridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC for the year ending December 31, 2024, and our Form 10-Q to be filed with the SEC for the quarter ended March 31, 2025. With that, let's get started. I'll turn the call over to Marc Ganzi, our CEO. Marc?
Marc Ganzi
Thanks, Severin. Let's start with our business update and cover the first quarter highlights. The two key takeaways for me in Q1 really center around two things. Number one, we delivered financial performance and fundraising in line with our objectives, on track to deliver on our 2025 goals. Second, which became increasingly relevant in April is the resilience of the digital infrastructure asset class and the value of owning and operating a diversified portfolio across the ecosystem. Let's start with scale. Here, we delivered strong financial performance with solid revenue and earnings growth in the first quarter. Fee revenues of $90 million and FRE of $35 million, up almost 80% year-over-year. Fundamentally, that's really strong growth, double-digit revenue growth with expanding margins. This is what we talked about last quarter as the key to our business model and to the DBRG investment case. Next up, fundraising. Look, here, we raised $1.2 billion in the quarter, led principally by commitments to our flagship DigitalBridge Partner strategy, which represented over 70% of our fundraising. Last quarter, we highlighted that the ratio of fund capital to co-invest would revert towards the longer trend, 65/35 in 2025. Fundraising in Q1 was consistent with that. We're at $6.3 billion in our third flagship fund as of March 31st, and we continue to take in commitments, and we continue to fundraise in that flagship product through the end of July. And look, what I can tell you is despite some of the headwinds out there and some of the noise around many things in our economy, allocators are still putting capital to work in digital infrastructure and our pipeline continues to expand with investor interest. The third component on our road map, invest. This centers around our support for
Tom Mayrhofer
Thanks, Marc, and good morning, everyone. As a reminder, this earnings presentation is available within the Shareholders section of our website. As usual, I'll start with our financial highlights, which Marc touched on briefly. In the first quarter, we recorded $90 million of fee revenue, an increase of 24% over the first quarter of 2024. Our fee revenue in the quarter benefited from strong organic platform expansion and $12 million of catch-up fees. This growth in fee revenue helped us generate $35 million of FRE in the quarter, an increase of almost 80% over Q1 of last year. We also delivered $55 million of distributable earnings this quarter, which includes a $34 million gain from the partial realization of our investment in DataBank and benefited from growth in recurring management fees. As of quarter end, our available corporate cash was $201 million, providing material liquidity and flexibility for us as we continue to evaluate both our capital structure and opportunities to invest in and grow our business. Moving to the next page. Fee-earning equity under management increased to $37.3 billion as of March 31, a 15% increase from last year and consistent with our guidance for 2025. This growth was anchored by a strong start to the year from a fundraising perspective with $1.2 billion of new fee-paying commitments raised during the first quarter, along with the activation of fees on certain previously raised capital from co-invests in our credit strategy, which typically begin earning fees once capital has been invested. This more than offset the step down in fees that resulted from the transition of our second InfraBridge fund from charging fees on committed capital to invested capital, which occurred in late December of last year, and we discussed on the fourth quarter earnings call. Turning to the next page, which summarizes our non-GAAP financial results. Fee revenues for the quarter exceeded $90 million, annual growth of 24%. Our FRE margin was 39% in the first quarter, benefiting from 100% flow-through on catch-up fees. We expect FRE margin to remain higher in the first part of this year through the expected final close of our flagship fund in early Q3 due to the contribution of catch-up fees. As mentioned earlier, the partial realization of our DataBank investment contributed to strong distributable earnings in addition to the continued growth in fee-related earnings. Stepping back, we're really pleased with our start to the year and the realization of principal investment income and carried interest, which we expect to become more consistent over time alongside the growth in management fees. Moving to the next page, which summarizes our carried interest and principal investment income. We reported a $5 million reversal of carried income during the quarter. As a reminder, the company accrues carried interest based on quarterly changes in the fair value of our fund investments. The reversal in our first quarter stems mainly from net increases in the fair value of our portfolio assets, which came in slightly below the preferred return hurdle on certain funds, resulting in a mark-to-market reduction in accrued carried interest. As we've discussed in prior quarters, carried interest compensation expense tracks these changes, and therefore, there was a commensurate reversal of a small amount of unrealized carried interest compensation this quarter. Principal investment income, which is accrued income and realized income earned on the company's GP investments in our various funds was $5 million. Turning to the next page. This chart continues to highlight the stability and consistency in growth, both in revenues and margin that we've experienced over the last two years. LTM FRE margin has grown to 35% as of the first quarter, which is consistent with our target of increasing our FRE margin by 200 basis points this year. This quarter, we saw $2 billion of FEM inflows, primarily from fundraising in our DBP funds and the activation of fees on co-investments and in our credit business upon the deployment of capital that I discussed earlier. These inflows were partially offset by $300 million of outflows largely associated with the DataBank transaction in which we and certain of our limited partners sold down a portion of our investment. Finally, the company continues to maintain a strong balance sheet with approximately $1.5 billion of corporate assets, largely reflecting our material investments alongside our limited partners and available corporate cash. Additionally, we have a fully undrawn corporate revolver and no debt maturities within the next 12 months. With positive free cash flow generation and strong liquidity, we're well positioned to deploy capital strategically to support growth in our business, and we continue to evaluate the appropriate capital structure for the company, including our preferred stock obligations. We're off to a strong start for the year, and we're very excited about the opportunity set that we see ahead of us. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Marc.
Marc Ganzi
Thanks, Tom. I want to finish today touching on the progress we continue to make building our private credit platform. It's one of the key strategies that's going to help drive 2025 performance, particularly in the first half of the year and be an engine for growth over the coming years. Let's cover some of our goals, what our pipeline looks like, highlighting an interesting transaction we just led and profile our team that has executed this great opportunity that we see in front of us. Let me start with fundraising. Here, we've got a tremendous pipeline. We have over 100 accounts working right now, evaluating our private credit strategies. We're looking to build on the $650 million we've already raised in our second credit strategy. As I referenced earlier, in periods of market volatility, private credit's appeal naturally elevates. This year, in addition to capital formation, we're originating and closing new loans and 4 have already closed year-to-date. And we're targeting to deploy up to $2 billion over the course of 2025, which in turn lights revenue, which is really important for our business plan this year. Another way we're scaling and leveraging our presence in the sector is through SMAs. You've heard this, of course, with many of our competitors who have long had the SMA strategy to grow and leverage their credit platform. Key LPs want to invest additional capital alongside of our loan book. This allows us to syndicate down large loans very easily, and we generate incremental FEM while at the same time, strengthening our LP relationships and bringing them back around to our core products. It's a really virtuous cycle in terms of how LPs think about deploying capital in private credit, but also how they think about deploying capital in our other strategies. Finally, we're focused on top of funnel, building a pipeline of new loans where today, we have over 90 discrete opportunities representing $13 billion in new loan origination. I'm not going to tell you we're going to close every loan and that we're going to ultimately activate $13 billion of new loan activity. But what I can tell you is we have a deep pipeline, we have a great team, and we're now really executing at scale in private credit. This is a really exciting development at DigitalBridge. So that's a high level of our plan for 2025. Let's go to the next slide, please. Let's talk about the state of play in digital private credit today and the opportunity that we're addressing. Here, our strategy is focused on the skill capital segment of the roughly $200 billion annual digital private credit opportunity. That's a TAM of over $65 billion for digital-focused credit that fits our mandate. As the scaled specialist in our ecosystem, today, we've got a robust pipeline of $13 billion that we believe is actionable over the next 12 to 18 months. These are largely proprietary deals where we are engaged one-on-one with the company and the senior leadership team. Again, as the leader in digital infrastructure, CEOs count on us. They call us. They trust us. We've been doing it for 30 years. That operational capability, that know-how and being able to sit in that chair and look another CEO across the table and say, I've sat in your chair, I understand your capital structure issues. I understand your customer issues, and I understand how to support your business is a conversation that no other private lender in the world can have. Again, it's about 30 years of operational experience and having experienced with those CEOs you're going through today. Turning to the right. About two weeks ago, we led a really interesting transaction, a $500 million debt facility at ALLO Fiber, one of the largest pure-play fiber providers serving 45 communities across the Mid and Southwest United States. It's a fantastic business. It's a business with a very strong reoccurring revenue base, low churn, favorable competitive dynamics, and we're backing a sponsor that we've known for a long time that has a distinguished track record in execution. What's really impressed us the most is the management team. Their CEO, Brad Moline, has built an impressive, high-quality business with high market penetration and excellent execution. It's the perfect example of how we deploy skill capital in the credit space to support top management teams as they execute. And by the way, that's pattern recognition. It's the same thing we do in our flagship equity product. We look for the best CEOs. When we find them, we get to know them and then we back up the truck and we support them. We're really excited to support Brad in his business. We're refinancing some of the existing debts here and providing growth CapEx towards new success-based fiber builds with strong asset coverage and a unique insight into the trajectory of the business at the same time. Our ability to lead significant transactions like the ALLO transaction activates new FEEUM, which in turn drives the growth of our credit platform and our corporate performance. Next slide, please. And again, I'm going to come right back to people. It all starts with the team. Our people are the alpha, as I always like to say, and we're building the leading team in digital credit, starting with veterans, Dean Criares and Mike
Operator
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] First question Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Ric Prentiss
Thanks. Good morning, everybody.
Marc Ganzi
Good morning, Godfather. How are you?
Ric Prentiss
Great. Hey, couple of questions. One, I know you said you're on track, but I just wanted to get at -- so we're saying basically reiterating the guidance that total company FRE grow 10% to 20%, $40 billion FEEUM, 34.5% FRE margins. Is that fair to say that those three key guidance items are maintained and reaffirmed today?
Tom Mayrhofer
Yes. I think I said in the fourth quarter that we expected kind of the performance to be a little bit front-loaded, but we are very comfortable with the guidance for the year.
Ric Prentiss
Understand.
Marc Ganzi
Yeah. And that front-loaded, obviously, the catch-up fees. Yeah.
Ric Prentiss
Okay. Just always like to get that out because, if we don't see it explicitly, people always get nervous. One question, I've got for you, obviously, I appreciate that chart, Marc, on the market volatility, tariffs and trade policy, short-term, long-term impacts. What does it do to potential carried interest events? I know you guys have talked about wanting to make that more consistent, hoping you might have a couple this year, but how is the market volatility impacting your thoughts on the timing and likelihood of carried interest events this year?
Marc Ganzi
Well, I think we see dealmaking has slowed down a little bit in the U.S. But interestingly enough, in the rest of the world, as you saw yesterday from David Solomons at Goldman Sachs, dealmaking is up globally over 50%. So it's very interesting that dealmaking is down in the U.S., Ric, by 30% and that global M&A is up 50% rest of the world. So this has happened in times before. You go back a couple of years and you saw deal making in the U.S. slump a little bit and rest of the world came up. And I think the key to us, Rick, is that we're a global firm today. We are not a U.S.-only firm. And so when you look at our assets and you look at our portfolio and we look at places where we think we can get liquidity, we don't have to look just here to the U.S. We've got great businesses in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. We get inbound inquiries every day for the 50-plus portfolio companies that we own. And when we do search for carried interest and liquidity this year, we are still looking in the U.S. There are some interesting things that we see in our portfolio that others value. So we have a series of ongoing strategic reviews across a number of companies that could produce some really good results. As we've always said, Rick, carried interest right now is episodic, but the goal is moving into this year and into next year is to move it from episodic into consistent. So we do expect some carried interest to be delivered this year. I can't give you with any precision given NDAs and processes that are ongoing, which portfolio companies are going to monetize. But we do have confidence and conviction that we can create those outcomes. Now, the guidance that Tom has given you does not include any significant carried interest this year. We were very clear about that when we set the guidance last year that that range of FRE was not going to have any material carried interest distributions for 2025. We do have some things that are happening in one of our portfolio companies in Europe that will trigger some carried interest. But by and large, I would say, Tom, we're not expecting -- with the guidance we've given the Street, there's nothing here that it would be a beat to the guidance essentially.
Tom Mayrhofer
Yes. And I wouldn't necessarily interchange principal investment returns in carry. But from our perspective, there are some similarities. And we did have the DataBank exiting Q1 that kind of doesn't flow through FRE, but hits distributable earnings and sort of we were really pleased with that.
Ric Prentiss
Makes sense. Last one for me. You guys still trade at a pretty significant discount to your peer group. Obviously, scale -- important to get scale. You touched on that a little bit. But help us understand what steps you can do to try and close that disconnect? I think there's a disconnect, but maybe just first, do you see the disconnect? And how can you close that disconnect?
Marc Ganzi
Well, I think the disconnect last year was we set a guidance target that didn't carefully plan for impact of timing around fundraising. And I think this year, we've done the opposite of that. We've put out a guidance that carefully does think through the timing and ultimately, the delivery of the FRE as it plays out in Q1 and Q2. And we've delivered a strong Q1. We anticipate delivering a strong Q2. And I think from our perspective, it's about execution, Rick. Investors want to know that DigitalBridge can be trusted to execute against its fundraising targets, its FRE goals. And ultimately, we want to be a consistent distributor of earnings at some point. That's a real key for us. I think Tom has done a great job creating strong liquidity. You see the distributable earnings are up significantly year-over-year this quarter against last year first quarter. And so that consistency and that execution is going to be what will really carry the day. Certainly, if we can scale, we talked about private credit in our presentation today, Rick, we're really bullish on private credit. We've got a massive big loan pipeline of over 90 loans, $13 billion in the backlog. We've got an easy target to hit of $2 billion of loan origination this year, which we think we can exceed. And we've got a great team. And most importantly, management teams trust DigitalBridge. When we're sitting across the table from a CEO and they're borrowing money from us, they're not just getting money. They're also getting our mind space, our 30 years of experience. And we think that's a swim lane as you've heard from other asset managers, whether it's Ares or Apollo, private credit is here to stay, Rick. And having a team that is the expert in private credit, similar to what we've done in equities for the last decade, we think that's a big place for us to scale. That's a huge area of white space. We've obviously talked about power. We've talked about stabilized real estate and data centers. These are big areas of growth. And as we scale this year and prove out that those funds and those -- not funds, but strategies can work for us, that's going to really be a proof point for investors. Scaling the business into power that's adjacent to data centers and being a clearing house for stabilized data centers, these are big ideas that we're currently executing. And I think as we execute those ideas and we execute against the earnings and FRE growth, investors are going to come back to us. And look, investors are voting with their wallets today, Rick. You've seen that in cell towers here in the last 30 days. In the moments of the storm, in the moments of volatility, what we find is that it's -- digital infrastructure is the place investors want to be. It's uncorrelated, long-term contracts, escalators and us running a global firm where we have somewhat immunity to tariffs as we build out in different parts of the world and we're regional, it really gives DigitalBridge a huge advantage to scale in this year. So we're very excited about what we're doing. And I think investors will come back to us this year, and we'll close that gap pretty quickly, because the stuff that we're doing is differentiated vis-à-vis our peers. And so this is a great opportunity for us to close that gap.
Ric Prentiss
Makes sense. Appreciate it. The focus on communication we like, and the focus on what industry you're focused on, is really good, too. I appreciate. Thanks guys.
Marc Ganzi
Yes. Thanks Ric.
Operator
Richard Choe with JPMorgan. Please proceed.
Richard Choe
Great. Two quick questions. One, you talked about the delays in LP decision-making, but kind of what are you hearing more recently? I know it's only been a month of real volatility, but any more insight you can give on what you're hearing more recently from potential investors? And then two, are you seeing some shift to investor interest in towers and a little bit away from data centers overall?
Marc Ganzi
Yes. Good morning, Richard. How are you? Thank you for your questions. Let me start with the first one, which is just around fundraising. So we've been on the road for the last 30 days, the top partners in the firm sort of in Asia, Middle East, Europe, here in North America. I was in Canada last week seeing all of our LPs in Canada. And look, investors are still allocating. I mean that's the key. We closed fund commitments in the last couple of weeks during this moment of volatility. In talking to investors directly, they really haven't changed their allocation strategy for 2025. I would say there's been in the 280-plus investors that are currently in diligence across our various fund products. We've only had two investors come to us in the last 30 days and say they're on pause. That feels pretty good actually. I was expecting more, to be honest with you, and it just hasn't manifested itself. I think at the end of the day, the people that we deal with, Richard, are large institutions. These are sovereign wealth funds, these are pension funds. They set their commitment schedules well in advance. You probably saw a press release from the state of New York last week around their allocation policy for this year. Their Board met last week, and they're proceeding with private markets and DigitalBridge is one of their choices. So we're really excited to have New York State Teachers Retirement System in our flagship fund. And this is what's happening. People are still committing. Why are they committing? What is the intention? The intention is people want to be exposed to digital infrastructure. And particularly our current strategy, our third fund strategy is about ecosystem investing, which is, of course, you said it right, Richard, towers. People are coming back to towers. We're investing in fiber. You've seen some of the activity that we've done in fiber in this quarter, whether it's the [indiscernible], the
Richard Choe
No, it makes sense that maybe there's some move away from US equities, but could easily go to global private equity platforms and digital infrastructure. So, yeah, thank you.
Operator
Next question, Randy Binner with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
Randy Binner
Hey, thank you. I was wondering, Tom, if you could review on carried interest, the mark-to-market impact. I missed that in the opening commentary, and I think that will be a question we'll get from some investors. But just a little bit more color and detail on how that mark impacted where carried interest came through the income statement?
Marc Ganzi
Yes, sure. Our marks were broadly flat, a little bit up in the quarter, but right around a little bit less than what the preferred return hurdle was for the quarter. So the value of the assets were up a little bit, but a little bit below the preferred return. So we gave back a little bit of accrued carried interest. Does that make sense?
Randy Binner
Yes. And then how do you expect pulling everything together from the call here and a good outlook and a stabilization after this pause in your markets, how would you expect that line item to progress as we go through the year and as you all perform on these goals you've laid out?
Marc Ganzi
Look, I don't really expect any meaningful disruption from the short-term volatility that we've seen. Our assets are long-term assets. They have long-term business plans, long-term cash flows. So I would not expect any unusual trends in terms of the asset values over the course of the year.
Randy Binner
Yeah. I guess what I'm getting to is when would we be able to expect that to turn more positive?
Tom Mayrhofer
Yes. Look, we go through the process on a quarterly basis. We feel good about our assets. We believe they'll continue to appreciate. But we're not -- I'm not going to project sort of future values of assets or kind of carry. But we sit down every quarter and do a rigorous process, and we'll do that again towards the end of this quarter, and we feel good about the assets that we have.
Marc Ganzi
Yes. I think also it's a philosophy around here in particular, which is we tend to be very conservative on how we mark our assets. Our framework really relies on three methodologies that we're not going to change. Since I started the firm 11 years ago, I've never changed our asset management framework. I've never changed our valuation framework. We have an independent committee that does that work. I'm not on that committee. We don't put our investment management team on that committee specifically. And we allow -- at the end of the year, we allow E&Y to audit our results. We take our marks very seriously. And I think the genesis of that is having numbers that are credible. And so when we do go to sell assets, like if you look in the past at whether it was Vantage Towers or whether it was Wildstone, we sold those assets anywhere from 27% to 40% premium to NAV. And everything we've ever sold since the inception of the firm, we've had an average of 25% to 40% premium to NAV. And I think that's important. It's important to mark your assets realistically. We're not paid on paper marks. It's really important. I know some funds actually get paid, they pay themselves quarterly on their paper marks. We don't do that. And I think having that transparency and having that independence in how we mark the assets really gives our LPs a lot of confidence that when we do publish our NAV, it sticks. and it's defensible. And so that's been our track record. I think, obviously, like what Tom said, we have a lot of confidence in what we're doing. Some of our portfolio companies really are performing well right now, and we'll revisit that in the second quarter, but we also don't want to get too exuberant at the same time. I think there's a lot of really positive things happening at
Tom Mayrhofer
Yes. And what we say they're worth today matters, but what's more important is what we actually sell them for.
Randy Binner
Got it. Okay. That's great color. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Tom Mayrhofer
Thanks, Randy.
Operator
Next question, Jonathan Atkin with RBC Capital Markets.
Tom Mayrhofer
Hi, Jonathan.
Operator
Jonathan, you’re line is live. We will move on to Jade Rahmani with KBW. Please go ahead.
Jason Sabshon
This is actually Jason Sabshon on for Jade. So just one question on the fundraising outlook. Perhaps have you seen any interest in -- any shift in LP interest more towards credit strategies versus the flagship funds in the current macro environment? Thanks.
Marc Ganzi
That's a really thoughtful question, Jason. Thank you for asking. I was hoping somebody was going to ask that today. We've actually seen an uptick in terms of the pipeline in credit. We have over 100 LPs now working on the credit fund, which is fantastic. That's up over 50% from where we were same time period 90 days ago. So I think the performance of our first credit fund was really spectacular. The performance of the second fund is working really well, and investors see that. But I think also, Jason, the magnet is the opportunity to co-invest, as I said on the call today. The chance to work with new investors on an SMA structure is something that's super undervalued, I think, in our business today. And the Alo transaction is only one of many transactions that we've closed this year, and we're closing other transactions. So I think what gets lost a little bit in the print is obviously, we're excited about the deep pipeline of interest in the credit fund. We highlighted that, that there's over 100 accounts working in the data room. We've closed 650 million of commitments. We feel like we've got really strong line of sight to hitting the fund target and exceeding the fund target. But what's not in that print is the SMAs. And what I really liked about the
Jason Sabshon
Great. Thank you.
Marc Ganzi
Thanks, Jason.
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Next question comes from Anthony Howe with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Anthony Howe
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Marc, can you bridge the gap between total capital that's signed and committed and the portion that's currently fee earning? So in other words, how much of the committed capital has not yet commenced and therefore, sits outside FEM? And what timing should we expect for those dollars to start generating management fees?
Marc Ganzi
So today, that number is at $4 billion. And as we deploy that capital into specific co-investments, which are portfolio companies that are lighting CapEx every quarter, we build into fees. And then, of course, credit. Credit is the big one. And you saw that on display this quarter. We had a great quarter, almost lighting $1 billion of new loans. We've got a strategy to do $2 billion, and we think we're going to exceed that, obviously. But credit is really the big driver of lighting up new FEM in Q2 and Q3. And so as we originate loans, at the same time, we're also lighting in parallel path SMAs, like I talked about the ALLO loan. And so you're going to see more of that. I think what we're telegraphing to you is that one of the areas where we could be a slight beat or a surprise would be in lighting new loans and lighting FEEUM and credit. And then, of course, as you look at big co-investments like Switch, Yondr, Vantage, DataBank, we have a significant amount of commitments lined up there. And as we light those commitments and we light up new construction, we're going to light up fees. And that's important because in data centers, as you know, it requires a lot of CapEx. And today, we've got -- we're in the process of building out over 2.3 gigawatts of data centers. And so that's a lot of CapEx that's going to be lit in the next 12 to 18 months. And that 2.3 gigawatts for the leases that are currently signed but not yet commenced. And so that requires a lot of CapEx, and we're going to light AUM and we're going to light FEEUM at the same time. So this backlog of leases that sit in data centers is huge. The backlog of loans is significant. And so there's a lot of FEEUM that's going to be activated here between now and the end of the year. That's already capital that's committed. We don't have to raise. I don't know, Tom, if you want to give any color.
Tom Mayrhofer
No, it is disproportionately co-investment and credit in terms of the kind of the fee rates, but nothing else to add.
Anthony Howe
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. I would like to turn the floor over to Marc for closing remarks.
Marc Ganzi
Well, look, I want to thank everyone for their interest today in DigitalBridge and your continued interest in digital infrastructure. I think it was a really solid quarter. We came out, we executed. We delivered exactly against what we told you we would deliver, probably a little bit of a beat to what the expectation was. I'm really proud of our team. The team is working harder than ever across fundraising, asset management, new deal execution and most importantly, delivering for our shareholders at the end of the day. You've seen the performance year-over-year up versus last Q1. Fundraising was up, distributable earnings was up, FRE was up, FEEUM was up. Every metric that matters to you as a shareholder is up year-over-year. It's important to note that we still have strong conviction around the things that are happening today, particularly in the data center landscape where you've seen our peers, Digital Realty and Equinix put up strong numbers. Well, we did the same thing. We also put up strong numbers. Our pipeline in terms of the amount of activity across our data center portfolio today sits at 9.9 gigawatts. This is up 38% year-over-year. 38% interest is up across our data center portfolio around the globe today. That is not a contraction. That is an acceleration. You've heard it from Microsoft, you've heard it from Meta. You're going to hear it from the other hyperscalers. The AI economy is not slowing down. In fact, it is accelerating, and it will require mission-critical infrastructure. The way we think you need to play mission-critical infrastructure is with DigitalBridge. We are -- we believe, the most diversified global builder, owner and manager of digital infrastructure. And you're proving today, as you've seen in tower stocks and you're seeing in data center stocks the last few days that these assets hold up in times of volatility and market uncertainty. We're going to continue to work hard for you. We're going to continue to keep fundraising, and our expectation is to continue to deliver outperformance against our guidance. Thank you for your time today. We look forward to engaging with all of our investors over the next few days. And again, we appreciate your interest in DigitalBridge. Thank you.
Transcript from May 1, 2025

Other Transcripts

 

dbrg Earnings Call Transcripts

DBRG