4 Data Center REITs That Pay Dividends: Where AI Boom Meets Steady Income

The AI data center boom has produced plenty of growth stories, but only a few of those companies pay a dividend. If you want income from this theme, you have to own the landlords and the infrastructure. Four US-listed REITs with real data center exposure pay dividends. Even the highest yield of the four, American Tower (NYSE:AMT), at about 4.44%, is well short of ultra-high-yield territory. What these names offer is coverage. Each one pays out a manageable share of its funds from operations, and AI leasing keeps driving those cash flows higher.

American Tower: Highest Yield on a Thin Data Center Bench

American Tower is mostly a global cell tower landlord, but its CoreSite data center business is where the AI demand shows up. In the second quarter, Data Centers segment revenue rose 13.4% to $297M, and management now expects data center growth of about 15% for the full year. On the call, management said “nine of the top 10 AI companies and three of the top five NeoClouds are deployed within our facilities.”

Yield: The forward dividend of $7.16 per share on a price of $161.18 works out to roughly 4.44%.

Dividend safety: For a REIT, the right test is AFFO (adjusted funds from operations). 2026 AFFO per share guidance is $11.00 to $11.17, so the forward dividend uses about 64.59% of the midpoint. Free cash flow came in at $1.16B (+18.5%) for the quarter. Leverage ended at 4.9 times, inside the company’s 3 to 5 times target range. The quarterly payout has grown from $0.21 in 2012 to $1.79 today, and the latest step was a 5.3% year-over-year increase. The CFO, Rod Smith, ranked the payout first among uses of capital: “First and foremost, it’s supporting the dividend and a growing dividend.”

For the bull case, the stock is down 13.21% over the past year, which raises the yield for new buyers. Management also called this year “a trough for attributable AFFO per share growth” and expects growth to return to the mid to high single-digit range heading into 2027.

Risk: Towers still make up most of the business, and tower churn can drown out data center gains. DISH cancellations cost $63M in the quarter and driving U.S./Canada property revenue down 2.5%.

Iron Mountain: Dividend Raised Four Years Running With AFFO Room to Spare

Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) started in records storage and now makes more and more from data centers and from asset lifecycle management (ALM), which means decommissioning and reselling old servers. Data center demand gets there it two ways: leasing and hardware refresh cycles. Global data center revenue rose 39% to $263 million, and data center decommissioning revenue more than doubled, rising more than 100%. About 325 megawatts of available capacity is expected to come online over the next 24 months.

Yield: At about 3.05% on a $3.456 forward dividend, the yield is modest. Iron Mountain makes this list because the payout keeps growing.

Dividend safety: The CFO, Barry Hytinen, put it simply: “On a trailing four-quarter basis, our AFFO payout ratio is now 60%.” Measured against 2026 AFFO per share guidance of $5.87 to $5.93, the forward dividend uses about 58.58% of the midpoint. Net lease-adjusted leverage of 4.8 times is the lowest since the company became a REIT in 2014. The dividend history confirms a fourth consecutive year of increases, with the quarterly payout rising from $0.6185 to $0.864.

Bull case: AFFO per share rose 16% last quarter, and growth businesses now make up 35% of second-quarter revenue. When cash flow grows faster than the dividend, the raises can keep coming without stretching the payout.

Risk: The balance sheet has a lot of debt. Shareholders’ equity is negative at -$955M, and net debt is about $17.3B, so rising interest costs compete with dividend growth for every dollar of AFFO.

Digital Realty: Coverage Keeps Widening on a Frozen Dividend

Digital Realty (NYSE:DLR) is a pure-play data center REIT with more than 6,000 customers. It leases everything from single cabinets to entire hyperscale campuses. Its share of backlog gets there its highest level ever at $1.4 billion, and $635 million of annualized rent is scheduled to start in the second half of the year.

Yield: The $4.88 forward dividend on a $177.82 share price yields about 2.74%.

Dividend safety: Measured on Core FFO, coverage is solid. Excluding promote income, Core FFO per share guidance is $8.15 to $8.20, so the dividend uses about 59.69% of the midpoint. Debt to adjusted EBITDA is 4.7 times, and liquidity is about $6 billion. The payout has been $1.22 per share every quarter since the 2022-03-14 ex-dividend date. Before that, it rose steadily from $0.93 to $1.16.

Bull case: Every year the dividend stays flat while Core FFO grows, the buffer under the payout gets larger. The company expects to extend double-digit Core FFO-per-share growth into 2027 and beyond, and the development pipeline is 63% pre-leased.

Risk: Your income isn’t growing. The board is putting cash and stock into expansion, including 12.3 million shares issued in the Blackstone (NYSE:BX | BX Price Prediction) deal, instead of raising the payout.

Equinix: Lowest Yield, Best-Covered Payout

Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX) runs interconnection hubs in 36 countries, where clouds, networks and enterprises plug into each other. It added a record 9,700 net interconnections last quarter. Management said eight of the top 10 model providers and eight of the top 10 neoclouds already run key networking workloads on its platform.

Yield: The forward dividend of $20.64 on a $1,019.39 share price yields about 2.02%. That’s a small yield. Equinix is on this list for dividend growth.

Dividend safety: Management describes the AFFO payout as “in the 50% range”. Against 2026 AFFO per share guidance of $42.69 to $43.29, the forward dividend uses about 48.01% of the midpoint, the best coverage in this group. Net leverage is 3.6 times, liquidity is about $7.7 billion, and the quarterly dividend has gone up every year in the record, from $1.75 to $5.16.

For the bull case, CFO Olivier Leonetti tied the payout directly to cash flow growth: “We expect dividend growth to approximate AFFO per share growth.” The long-term plan calls for AFFO per share growth of 9% to 12% a year through 2029.

On the risk side, capital spending is set to run $5 billion to $7 billion annually through 2029, and management expects leverage to rise by about a turn. That means less free cash flow to speed up dividend growth.

Income From Digital Infrastructure Comes From Coverage

All four payouts depend on a small group of very large customers continuing to spend heavily. At Digital Realty, for example, the largest signing in each of the last 10 quarters came from one of six different top hyperscalers. That tenant concentration is a real risk for the whole group. Within those limits, Iron Mountain has the best mix of yield, a verified record of raises and roughly a 60% AFFO payout ratio. American Tower pays the most current income, Equinix has the best-covered payout, and Digital Realty’s improving coverage makes it the dividend raise to watch.

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