The assets powering the AI era, the e-commerce supply chain, and global connectivity look nothing like the real estate most investors own. That gap is an opportunity.

The Buildings That Matter Most to the Modern Economy

Ask most investors what real estate exposure they hold, and the answer is familiar:

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) weighted toward shopping centers, suburban office parks and apartment complexes.

These are the assets that defined the last generation of commercial property, and they remain the dominant weights in most broad real estate benchmarks today.

Meanwhile, something significant has happened. Over the past decade, a separate category of real estate has quietly become central to how the global economy functions. These include:

• The facilities housing artificial intelligence workloads, in other words, data centers.
• The towers transmitting 5G signals across cities and continents.
• The laboratories where the next generation of therapies is being developed.
• The warehouses executing same-day delivery at scale.

These assets share the legal and structural characteristics of traditional real estate, in that they are owned, leased, and operated, but their demand drivers have almost nothing to do with economic cycles.

They are driven instead by structural transformations, for instance:

• The digitization of commerce
• The explosion of data and the artificial intelligence systems running on that data
• The reshoring of pharmaceutical manufacturing
• The insatiable bandwidth requirements of a connected world

This is new economy real estate, and we believe institutional capital has taken notice in a decisive way.

Data Centers: The Power Plants of the AI Era

A single large hyperscale data center can draw as much power as an electric arc furnace steel mill, a comparison the International Energy Agency (IEA) itself has drawn to convey the scale of what the AI buildout requires physically.¹ That comparison is not meant as a warning—it is meant to convey scale. The physical infrastructure required to train and run AI models, store the world’s cloud data, and execute billions of real-time transactions is growing at a pace that few anticipated even five years ago.

JLL describes the data center sector as being at the start of one of the largest infrastructure investment supercycles of the modern era. The firm projects up to $3 trillion in investment needed by 2030 and approximately 100 gigawatts of new capacity coming online — representing $1.2 trillion in real estate asset value creation.² The North American data center vacancy rate closed 2025 at a record low of 1.4%, even as primary-market inventory expanded 36% year-over-year, and CBRE projects 2026 is on track to set a new record for leasing activity, with pricing at all-time highs.³ In Europe, AI-driven demand is colliding with power grid constraints that severely limit new supply, pushing vacancy toward an all-time low of 6.5% projected by year-end.⁴

The investment implication is clear:

Cloud computing and AI are more than discretionary trends. The real estate underpinning them is becoming as essential as the power grid itself.

Life Sciences: A Sector Turning a Decisive Corner

Construction in the life sciences real estate sector is projected to hit a ten-year low in 2026, easing the oversupply pressure from the post-pandemic building surge. Remaining construction is increasingly limited to fully leased build-to-suit projects, meaning new supply is already spoken for before it arrives.

Capital markets are already responding. Global R&D investment sales rebounded to $13.5 billion in 2025, up 28% year-over-year. Global life sciences venture capital held steady at $49 billion, and for real estate investors, the relevance is direct: CBRE documents a consistent two-quarter lag between increases in life sciences VC funding and increases in lab leasing demand. Capital flowing into life sciences companies today translates, predictably, into demand for lab and R&D space in the quarters ahead.

The honest characterization of life sciences real estate in 2026 is not that the recovery is complete—vacancy remains elevated. It is that the conditions for recovery are assembling:

• Supply contracting
• Institutional capital returning
• Leading indicators positive

For investors willing to look ahead of the current headline metrics, the setup is more compelling than the narrative suggests.⁵

Telecom Infrastructure: Connectivity as a Capital Asset

5G densification continues to drive tower network buildout requirements, while the emerging satellite connectivity market is opening addressable populations that terrestrial networks have never reached. Foresight Group's 2026 listed infrastructure outlook describes demand for infrastructure, including digital networks, as "not only persistent but accelerating," with regulatory support and long-dated frameworks offering clearer return pathways than most infrastructure categories.

The broader public-sector investment signal reinforces this. The $500 billion Stargate AI initiative in the U.S., the EU's €20 billion InvestAI program, and Saudi Arabia's $100 billion AI infrastructure commitment are primarily compute and data center programs, but they are also connectivity programs by necessity. None of this infrastructure functions without the physical networks that carry data between facilities, users, and devices. Government capital at this scale creates structural demand for the underlying connectivity layer.⁶

Modern Logistics: The Supply Constraint Nobody Is Talking About

Industrial and logistics real estate delivered its second-best leasing year on record in 2025, with approximately 940 million square feet of activity across the U.S., up 12% from the prior year, surpassed only by the pandemic-era peak of 2021. The structural driver is straightforward, and Prologis projects U.S. e-commerce penetration to rise from 24% of retail goods today to 30% by 2030, and estimates that shift alone will generate 250 to 350 million additional square feet of logistics demand over the next five years.

What makes the current setup particularly compelling is the supply side. Prologis reports that new logistics deliveries in 2026 are on track for their lowest level in more than a decade, with new development starts down 71% from peak levels. Demand rising while supply contracts sharply is not a subtle signal—it is the fundamental backdrop logistics real estate owners have been waiting for.

In Europe, Savills forecasts occupier demand to remain resilient and improve in 2026, driven by e-commerce penetration, nearshoring, and, notably, data center-driven logistics requirements. That last point is worth pausing on: the same buildout powering the data center section of this article is also generating incremental logistics demand in Europe. These four sectors are not independent silos. They are interconnected nodes of the same structural shift.⁷

Conclusion: Capturing the Opportunity with the WisdomTree New Economy Real Estate Fund (WTRE)

WTRE is designed to track the total return performance of, before fees and expenses, the WisdomTree New Economy Real Estate Index.⁸ This index is focused on companies that cover the distinct themes we went through earlier in this piece, and it also includes a bit of flexibility. For instance, the index committee was looking at the intent behind the Towers and Connectivity topic. We did not want to miss out on exposure to low-Earth orbit satellite constellations, given that we are moving in a direction that, depending on where you are, the concept of connectivity may be best met with towers, or it may be best met with satellites, but to truly capture the trend, you may need exposure to at least some of each.

In Figure 1b, as of March 31, 2026, we see particularly strong recent performance rankings within WTRE’s Morningstar category, Global Real Estate. It is interesting to us to see if the shorter-term trend where the fund is tracking the current strategy and index continues to look markedly different from the longer-term track record where the strategy was tracking a Global ex-U.S. focused real estate index from 2007 to 2022.

Figure 1a: Standardized Performance

Figure 1b: Rankings within the U.S. Global Real Estate Category

In closing, we spend a lot of time talking about artificial intelligence, connectivity, data, cybersecurity, physical AI, drones—the list goes on and on. Each of these themes requires infrastructure and real estate decisions, and WTRE represents an interesting, focused option on some of these areas.

¹ Source: International Energy Agency. (2024). What the data centre and AI boom could mean for the energy sector.

² Source: JLL. (2026, January 6). 2026 Global Data Center Outlook: Navigating AI demand, power constraints and global opportunities.

³ Source: CBRE. (2026). North America Data Center Trends H2 2025.

⁴ Source: CBRE. (2026). European Data Centres Outlook 2026.

⁵ Sources for Life Sciences segment: CBRE. (2026). 2026 U.S. Life Sciences Trends; CBRE. (2026). U.S. Real Estate Market Outlook 2026: Life Sciences; Cushman & Wakefield. (2026, February). Life Sciences Update: February 2026.

⁶ Sources for Connectivity segment: Foresight Group. (2026). Listed infrastructure outlook for 2026; OpenAI. (2025, January 21). Announcing the Stargate Project; European Commission. (2025, February 11). EU launches InvestAI initiative to mobilise €200 billion of investment in artificial intelligence; Saudi Arabia HUMAIN / Public Investment Fund. (2025, May).

⁷ U.S. Industrial and Logistics Figures; Prologis. (2025). The E-Commerce Boom Isn't Over: Implications for Logistics Real Estate; Prologis. (2026, January). Bold Predictions for 2026: Supply Chain Trends to Watch; Savills. (2026, January). The Experts View: European Industrial and Logistics Real Estate Market — 2026.

⁸ WTRE began tracking the total return performance of this index on April 10, 2025. The full list of changes to the strategy are included in the sourcing after Figure 1b.