From AI-driven design to next-gen energy solutions, the future of real estate is increasingly digital. Bricks & Bytes brings together leading investors, developers, and innovators at the intersection of real estate and technology to unpack the trends shaping tomorrow’s built environment. Each session dives into one of the critical forces redefining our industry—data centers, power, AI, and more—with candid insights from those building at scale.

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Episode 3: From Dirt to Digital: The New Blueprint for Data Center Development

As demand for digital infrastructure surges, developers are racing to turn powered sites into billion-dollar data campuses. Behind every hyperscale tenant is a team moving at unprecedented speed to entitle, design, and deliver. This session breaks down the modern data center development playbook, from site selection and power procurement to financing, leasing, and exit strategies. Hear from the developers, investors, and partners driving this evolution — faster, smarter, and at scale.

Featured Speakers:

• Pankaj Sachdeva | McKinsey
  Pankaj is a senior partner and leader in McKinsey’s Technology, Media & Telecommuni­cations Practice. He advises CEOs of technology companies on their growth and M&A agenda and CIOs/CTOs on their cloud, AI, and platform transformations. Pankaj globally leads McKinsey’s cloud infrastructure and data center work. In this capacity, he serves investors, operators, hyperscalers, suppliers, and energy companies across the data center value chain. Pankaj also leads a firmwide collaboration that brings several industry sectors and functional practices together to address the massive imbalance between the surging compute demand with innovative, sustainable, and energy-efficient digital infrastructure solutions.
• Amit Narayan | GridCARE
  Amit is the Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a company using AI to unlock hidden grid capacity and accelerate power access for data center developers. As AI drives unprecedented energy demand, GridCARE helps infrastructure teams secure reliable power faster and more affordably—without waiting for new construction. A proven entrepreneur, Amit previously founded energy AI pioneer AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric) and chip design company Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics, now part of Siemens).
• Ben Wobschall | CBRE
  Ben joined CBRE’s Data Center Capital Markets Team in 2024, focusing on the capitalization of data center investment properties throughout North America. Ben has over 20 years of experience in institutional real estate investment management covering asset management, acquisitions and dispositions, development, joint ventures, capital raising, and portfolio management. Across his career, he has completed transactions totaling over 28 million square feet of real estate with a combined capitalization exceeding $5 billion.

• Brendan Gallagher | Beale Infrastructure
  Brendan is SVP of Development on Beale’s development team. He brings more than 18 years of experience developing and delivering large scale infrastructure projects with a focus on data center site development. His most recent roles were at Meta and Microsoft where he served as Director, Global Site Development and Director, Americas Land Development, respectively. His prior experience also includes Engineering Program Management at Jacobs Engineering Group, where he managed development of complex large data center projects for clients globally.

About the Creator & Moderator

Samidha Thakral is the creator and moderator of Bricks & Bytes. An experienced investment and development leader, she has helped deliver more than $5B in real estate and digital infrastructure projects across North America. At Prologis, she has played a central role in building a 1GW data center pipeline and delivering award-winning, innovative projects that set new standards in sustainability and design.