Tracking the infrastructure narrative: EMEA data centre trends unveiled

As hyperscaler demand and AI accelerated infrastructure needs have surged, the data centre sector has became one of the most competitive and dissected areas in real estate, with a flood of research and content from leading property firms and consultancies to match.

Our client — a global leader in CRE investment and services — wanted to understand how its global competitors were covering the asset class and engaging with clients across reports, blogs, and media, to benchmark its own thought leadership and seize opportunities to lead industry conversations.

They aimed to:

• Decode which subtopics, markets and risks were dominating the industry narrative – and which were only beginning to appear on the radar
• Track share of voice across real estate and other major publishers on the asset class

Identify opportunities to build authority on emerging themes, and differentiate their output in terms of depth, focus and formats

New Narrative conducted a multi-source, multi-format content analysis, reviewing and comprehensively investigating:

• 60+ white papers, reports, and blogs from leading real estate and consultancy firms
• Over 2,000 news and media articles across global and regional outlets
• Hundreds of geographic and organizational entities

We structured our approach around five pillars:

• Narrative mapping across real estate, consulting, and media
• Subtopic clustering to track trends like AI infrastructure, ESG, grid constraints, and planning reform
• Sentiment analysis and publication timing patterns
• Benchmarking competitor positioning in UK and EMEA engagement
• Insight generation to inform content strategy and messaging

The client received a 360° view of the competitive content landscape — with actionable intelligence and clear pathways to thought leadership advantage. The iN/Ntelligence research and analysis:

• Identified the most important subtopics across competitors and media, led by AI infrastructure, power constraints, and ESG innovation
• Mapped share of coverage and sentiment trends across 10 major real estate and consulting firms, hundreds of content assets and multiple markets
• Uncovered emerging ‘white space’ themes such as AI readiness, Tier 2 market ROI, and ESG benchmarking gaps
• Delivered ready-to-activate strategic messaging recommendations based on the findings, as well as an in-depth content roadmap to ensure future thought leadership campaigns are differentiated and of maximum relevance