A new infrastructure investment supercycle is taking shape in 2026, one that could prove as consequential as the industrial buildout that transformed the U.S. economy more than a century ago.
Unlike the titans who built the railroads, steel mills, oil refineries, electric grids, shipping networks and automobile industries that powered America’s industrial revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the infrastructure being built today is increasingly digital — encompassing artificial intelligence, computing, data centers, semiconductors, financial technology and the power systems required to operate them.
The scale of the buildout is already substantial. JLL estimates that the global data-center industry alone could require about $3 trillion of investment through 2030, including $1.2 trillion of real-estate asset creation. Meanwhile, major technology companies are projected to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on AI infrastructure, while Nvidia has announced plans with major Wall Street firms to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure over time.
That buildout is also creating an emerging concept within traditional real-estate investing circles: Digital Real Estate.
The term describes the technology infrastructure that increasingly will sit behind the world’s property markets — including AI marketplace infrastructure, market intelligence and data infrastructure, programmable capital markets, and transaction infrastructure. The objective is to solve foundational problems in the global real-estate industry by consolidating, automating, digitizing, and ultimately financializing an industry still characterized by fragmentation, friction, information gaps and significant amounts of manual, analog activity.
Michael J. Gerrity
One company pursuing that thesis is Miami-based World Property Ventures, a real-estate technology holding company and venture studio founded in late 2024 by entrepreneur Michael J. Gerrity. WPV is building a portfolio of digital platforms intended to address what Gerrity describes as foundational inefficiencies across the $600 trillion global property value chain.
“Ultimately, we’re in the real estate problem-solving business,” Gerrity said.
He describes WPV’s development strategy as three repeatable forms of shareholder-value creation: building companies whose technologies reduce transaction costs, fragmentation, analog friction and information gaps; building tokens that can represent real-world assets and potentially trade through emerging digital exchanges; and building currencies, including industry-specific stablecoins designed for 24-hour global payments and settlements.
As a byproduct, Gerrity argues that digital real-estate infrastructure plays will become a complementary asset class for traditional property investors — allowing owners of physical properties to gain exposure to the technology platforms, data networks and financial infrastructure increasingly supporting the industry itself.
“We’re building the digital market infrastructure of tomorrow — the digital rails the world’s real estate industry will increasingly search, discover, evaluate, decide, finance and transact on,” Gerrity said.
The analogy is less about copying the industrial titans of the past than recognizing the economics of market infrastructure. John D. Rockefeller built an enormous oil business through Standard Oil over a century ago by developing critical refining infrastructure as oil became central to America’s industrial revolution. Today, the emerging opportunity may be to build and own the digital rails for the world’s largest asset class: real estate.
For investors, the question is no longer simply who will own property.
It may also be who will own the digital infrastructure through which property is found, analyzed, financed, bought and sold.