Kris McGee

Dirt Dawg. I sell land. Sometimes it has stuff on it. 32 years of Dirt Dawg wisdom, deals and data. From The Dirt Up.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

Your brownfield isn't a liability. It might be the next De Soto. That and more, this week from the Dirt Up.

https://t.co/v0CP8Gv225

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

they're literally leaving the planet to avoid the grid queue.

SpaceX orbital data centers. wave-powered ocean rigs. the biggest data center contract ever written. billions flowing off-grid because land entitlements, community opposition, and time to power are that broken.

https://t.co/K6SEMI9zvx

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

1/ CBRE's Q1 2026 report buried the lead.

data center suppliers now account for 27% of all U.S. manufacturing leasing.

not data centers. the factories that build the parts inside them.

that's the land play nobody's pricing in:

2/ everyone in CRE is chasing hyperscale campuses and the Northern Virginia land rush. the numbers are big and the headlines are loud.

but i sell dirt. and the dirt is telling me something different.

3/ picks and shovels.

data centers run on physical stuff. switchgear, cooling systems, fiber optics, prefab components. every one of those comes out of a factory. every factory sits on a piece of land somebody has to find and close.

4/ Nvidia and Corning just announced three new U.S. plants making fiber and connectivity equipment for AI data centers.

three thousand jobs on American soil. those factories need industrial dirt with highway access near where the big campuses are going up.

5/ Siemens just broke ground on two factories in Wake County, NC. 350 jobs making power distribution components that move electricity from the grid to the racks.

the Carolinas, Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska. that's the map right now.

6/ the numbers back it up. manufacturing leasing jumped 28% year over year per CBRE. Prologis says data center suppliers now account for 10% of new industrial leases. that was 5% a year ago.

that trend line moves one direction.

7/ here's what matters if you work in land like i do.

this demand doesn't need a gigawatt of power or a utility substation next door. it needs proximity to data center corridors, highway access, and zoning that can handle light manufacturing.

8/ that land exists right now. most of it isn't priced for what's coming.

the market still values it as generic industrial while the demand curve bends toward it. i see this every week.

9/ think of it this way.

everybody's fighting over the new subdivision. i want the hardware store down the street that sells to every contractor building in it.

10/ the reshoring story everyone said they wanted is here. it just doesn't look like a hyperscale campus.

it looks like 50 acres off the interstate with good power and a workforce within 30 minutes.

follow @krmcgoo. i write about the dirt behind the data center boom.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

Chevron powering Microsoft's data center off grid in West Texas. JERA building a $3B gas plant just to feed AI training. both targeting 2028.

this is the pattern i've been writing about for months. the grid queue is 7 to 10 years deep and developers are going around it.

i sell dirt. 32 years in commercial real estate. the single biggest shift i've seen in site selection is that power is no longer a utility problem. it's a real estate problem.

the land under the turbine matters as much as the land under the server rack now. if your site doesn't come with a power solution, you don't have a site. you have a pin on a map.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

Prologis said on their earnings call that every megawatt they can deliver over the next three years is already in dialogue with customers.

the world's largest industrial developer. and the power is spoken for before the wire is pulled.

i've been saying time to power is the deal. this is what that looks like from the top of the food chain.

if you're shopping for data center land and you haven't locked your power path, you're already behind the people who did.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

$17.5 billion. that's the number the Trump administration just put behind nuclear power in the US.

10 new reactors by 2030. each one 1.1 GW. enough baseload power to run entire metro grids without blinking.

the reason is simple. AI and data centers are eating the power grid alive. the queue to connect a new facility to the grid is 7 to 10 years deep in some jurisdictions. renewables alone can't cover it. solar and wind are intermittent. you can't train a model on sunshine that comes and goes.

nuclear is the only source that runs 24/7 at scale and doesn't need a gas pipeline.

this initiative is funding the supply chain bottlenecks that have killed nuclear projects for decades. reactor vessels, specialized forgings, components that only a handful of factories on earth can produce. that's where the money goes. into hardware, not policy papers.

now here's why i'm paying attention.

i sell dirt. 32 years in commercial real estate watching how energy reshapes land markets. every time a new power source locks in, the land around it reprices.

when xAI picked Memphis for Colossus, they didn't pick it because it was a hot data center market. they picked it because there was a vacant factory, a dormant power plant, and regulators who moved fast. land and power. that was the whole checklist.

nuclear sites will do the same thing. 10 reactors means 10 locations where power is no longer the constraint. and wherever power is abundant and permitted, data center developers will show up with checkbooks.

the land play here is real. industrial parcels near planned reactor sites. brownfields with existing transmission infrastructure. rural counties with the right zoning and the political will to say yes. those are the sites that reprice first.

most people will read this as an energy story. i read it as a land story.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

One campus in Memphis is generating $2.32 billion a month in compute revenue.

Three tenants. One former factory site. Here's the updated Colossus stack as of today.

Anthropic on Colossus 1 for $𝟭.𝟮𝟱 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 through May 2029 with roughly 325,000 GPUs.

Google on Colossus 2 for $𝟵𝟮𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵, ramping from October through June 2029.

Reflection AI is jumping in on July 1 for $𝟭𝟱𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 through 2029 on GB300 chips.

Colossus started for xAI's own models. Now it's shifting hard into renting out capacity at scale, and the market is lining up to plug in right now.

Google is even building its own massive campus just across the river in West Memphis.

That's the tell: ready-to-go power and infrastructure wins.

The Colossus campus itself rose fast on a former Electrolux factory site.

They had the industrial bones and power history already in place.

Power and position beat raw dirt every single time.

Tenants want sites where they can actually plug in fast, with real power access and infrastructure ready to go.

Repositioning "stuff on it" keeps proving the edge. Sites with existing infrastructure can move faster and de-risk quicker than greenfield plays. History rhymes here.

While some markets hit pause and others chase incentives, the fundamentals continue to drive demand for entitled, powered land that tenants can actually plug into today.

The hype cycle always corrects. Always. But these multi-year commitments show the buildout has legs.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

everyone in CRE is chasing data center campuses right now. the hyperscale leases. the Northern Virginia land rush.

i sell dirt. and what i see is something different.

picks and shovels.

Nvidia and Corning announced three new U.S. manufacturing plants producing fiber and connectivity equipment for AI data centers. three thousand jobs on American soil. the factories that feed the data centers need somewhere to land.

that somewhere is land.

CBRE's Q1 2026 data shows manufacturing leasing jumped 28% year over year, with data center suppliers accounting for 27% of all U.S. manufacturing leasing. we're talking switchgear, cooling systems, fiber optics, prefab components. all of it needs industrial land with highway access near where the big campuses are concentrating.

this is the reshoring story everyone said they wanted.

Siemens just announced two new factories in Wake County, North Carolina. 350 jobs making power distribution components that move electricity from the utility grid to the racks. the Carolinas, Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska. sites with workforce, access, and zoning that can handle light manufacturing and logistics.

that land exists right now. most of it isn't priced for what's coming.

Prologis reported data center suppliers now account for 10% of new industrial leases, up from 5% a year ago. that number moves in one direction. the land that captures this demand doesn't need a gigawatt of power. it needs proximity, access, and the vision to see what that corridor is about to become.

it's like owning the hardware store down the street from the new subdivision.

everybody's fighting over the subdivision. i want the hardware store.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

This one hit me square in the chest this morning.

"The father discovers that the entire point of holding on, from the very beginning, was to be able to let go. You simply show up, day after unremarkable day, and you become the thing your child leans against until the day he no longer has to."

Mike Kimmelman, Sovereign Sunday newsletter.

Happy Father's Day to every dad just showing up.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

@zuhayeer Awesome

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

time to power. time to land. time to yes.

that's the new site selection formula.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

everyone's focused on the SpaceX IPO valuation. $1.75 trillion. largest listing in history.

i get it. big number.

but if you're in CRE, the more interesting number is 12.

[Kris McGee @krmcgoo]

i sell land. sometimes it has a power plant on it.

the SpaceX IPO will dominate headlines this week. but the real story for people in this business is what it reveals about where the next infrastructure wave is landing.

and it's landing in places that haven't been on the map.