Dive Brief:
- JLL has struck an agreement with prefabricated AI data center solutions specialist InfraPartners to help it fast-track AI data center development and operations, the company announced Tuesday.
- “AI infrastructure demands a new approach,” Matt Landek, division president of data centers and critical environments at JLL, said in a statement. “With InfraPartners, we are delivering a unique blueprint that brings real estate, engineering and operational precision into a unified model.”
- The deal gives JLL a way to provide an end-to-end delivery model to hyperscalers, GPU-as-a-service providers, colocation operators and enterprise clients so they can deploy scalable, AI-ready infrastructure quickly, the company says.
Dive Insight:
The demand for data centers is high but deployment is slowed by labor shortages, financing complexities and other challenges, JLL says. The partnership with InfraPartners aims to solve these issues.
A spike in demand for cloud and AI services has upended the market, driving rents up by 50% in the last five years, even as supply in major regions has doubled or tripled, according to JLL research. Cloud and technology providers, like AI-focused hyperscalers and colocation facilities, accounted for the majority of global capacity in the first half of 2025, and are expected to grow that share, JLL says.
“Our clients are asking for faster, lower-risk routes to delivering AI infrastructure,” Michalis Grigoratos, CEO at InfraPartners, said in a statement.
The new model provides advantages for AI environments that require speed, flexibility and energy efficiency, said JLL, noting that prefabricated units, manufactured offsite, can improve quality control and minimize onsite construction. The process can also standardize designs, allowing for faster deployment and more seamless upgrades as requirements evolve.
“This is one of the first collaborations to fully integrate data center design, manufacturing, construction, commissioning, computer deployment and lifecycle management for institutional-grade real estate delivery,” JLL Managing Director Kristen Vosmaer said in a statement. It marks “a significant shift in shortening the time to monetization for how mission-critical infrastructure assets are developed and maintained.”
Vosmaer, who was hired last June to lead JLL’s data center business, will be involved in managing the agreement with InfraPartners, according to the company. The InfraPartners deal follows JLL’s plan to acquire SKAE Power Solutions, a New York-based data center design and engineering firm, that is another part of the company’s effort to boost its data center expertise. SKAE is intended to help it provide technical services within the sector.
The InfraPartners collaboration will initially target high-growth AI markets, predominantly in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa in the first quarter of 2026, with plans to scale to additional regions, JLL said.
