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IRM · Iron Mountain Inc
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$109.96 -0.70 (-0.63%) At close · Oct 23
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Conference · 2026-03-12

Iron Mountain Inc (IRM) March 12, 2026 Conference Transcript

Concluded Mar 12, 2026 Audio replay
Mar 12, 2026 37:09 30 turns
Period
2026-03-12
Runtime
37:09
Sources
2 artifacts

Transcript & audio

37:09 Audio
Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Hey, good morning, everyone. Kurt Nagel, I'm the Senior Business and Information Service Analyst here at B of A. This session's Iron Mountain. I'm very pleased to welcome CFO Barry Heitenden. We're going to structure this as a fireside. If there's time at the end, we'll certainly field questions. Barry and I go way back when I used to cover TPX, and he was the CEO. So from a personal perspective, it's a real pleasure to have you back on stage, Barry, and welcome, and thank you. Good to see you again, Kurt. Good to see you too. Okay, so starting from the top, records management business, building on that, adding digital solutions, lifecycle management, data centers. In terms of, I guess, just, again, sort of the high level, revenue growth, double digit, visibility on that, confidence, that continuing, competitive edges. Could you frame that? Yeah.

Well, Kurt, we've got a really interesting business in that it's one that has been public for quite a while, but if people haven't kind of kept up with the story, it's a reasonably fast-growing company at this point, and that is thanks to the fact that the team here started investing in areas some years ago that would more easily cross-sell off of our core. You know, we operate a company that has 240,000 client relationships around the world, and most of those have been doing business with us for literally decades, 95% of the Fortune 1,000. And they standardized with us and have continued to work with us for years and years because our retention rates are, like, very, very high because we offer a very good value. We chain of custody, privacy, security is what they value in terms of our core service offering. And over the last few years, we have been expanding quite rapidly in three distinct growth areas that you just touched on. So if I start with our core business, that today represents about 70% of the company's revenue. If you go back about five, six years ago, I joined six and a half years ago. At that time, the core business was, round numbers, like 90% of the business. Now, today, the business is much bigger. Like that core business is over a billion dollars of revenue bigger and much better margins. and yet it's only 70% of the company. And that's because the growth areas have been growing and likely will continue to grow for a long period of time at very high rates. You know, data center, it wasn't that many years ago, we were a $200 million revenue data center business. Last year, we did 800 million in revenue, low 50s EBITDA margin. That's up over a thousand basis points over the last few years. It's still got more opportunity to expand because we are far from, if you will, stabilized. We're operating a portfolio of about 490 megawatts, 98% leased. And we've got, you know, enough megawatts that are either under construction or held for development that we could more than double the business, if not triple. And so – and data center is a secularly growing part of the economy. We are seeing very good returns on the deals we write. And we've become a trusted vendor to several of the largest cloud hyperscalers. And that's where we've done more and more repeat business. That business is going to go from strength to strength. In fact, just to give you a sense, we could build out to $1.35 billion of annual revenue without even leasing anything else at this point. That's what we've already contracted for. So we'll do over a billion of revenue this year with an EBITDA margin that is up in that segment every quarter, year on year. Our ALM business, it's a story that I think the investment community is only starting to appreciate because it's a newer story. In 2021, I think we did $38 million of revenue in our ALM business, Kurt. And last year, we did $633 million.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Sorry, $40 million on?

$38 million, yeah, in 2021. We did $633 last year. We guided to $850 this year. I think in time, it will be our biggest business on a revenue basis. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that business. But it's a huge TAM. I think the TAM is something like 3x what we address in records. So it's much more revenue opportunity per client than what we have in records. And it's a very, very fragmented industry. And it cross-sells quite well off of our core client base because all of our core clients have a need for the same service. And they can't have it serviced by a single partner like they do with us in records today because that offering doesn't exist. We're already the largest player in that market. I think we've got a tremendous amount of growth coming in front of us on ALM. And then our digital solutions business, it is also growing very, very well. It wasn't that many years ago we were doing $150 million. At that time, it was principally scanning. Today, last year, we exited the year on a quarterly run rate of doing $600 million annualized. And it was growing high teens to 20%. It continues to grow strength to strength. We just won a very large contract with the United States government. that adds nearly 10 points of growth to that business this year and another nearly 10 points of growth to next year on top of the secularly growing business we have in digital solutions. We built, our team built a platform called what we call DXP. It really helps clients significantly lower cost. And in terms of a whole variety of use cases, we see incremental traction. That business is becoming more recurring in nature. and so there's just a there's a lot of growth in our business and uh we you know it's all about execution you in defense the only uh verticals growing in government at this point well the thing about it is uh you know government efficiency that's a tailwind to our business okay because uh if you look at our business we we you know we don't do a tremendous amount with the government because a lot of processes are internalized at the government. And having the opportunity to outsource and do things in a more efficient kind of done through process and software is a means to significantly lower costs for the government. And the IRS example that I was just speaking to is just one. That opportunity saves the government a tremendous amount of money, I think hundreds of millions of dollars. And there's more use cases for that. And another example, the government stores a lot of physical records. We don't store much for them because they have it all internalized. So we're working with the U.S. government as well as governments around the world to help them become more efficient. And I think that efficiency effort is a tailwind to us for the next several years.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Maybe just a quick follow-up on that, just interesting points on the government. IRS is the tip of the spear, maybe?

It's a big opportunity. It's obviously a big win. It's probably one of the largest opportunities we've got with the government. Obviously, we already won it. It's a multi-year contract with renewal options, and we feel super good about where we are. It also is sort of a means to, yes, get into more opportunities because as a result of that deal, we've recently announced we're now FedRAMP high, which is one of the key standards for being able to do more work with the government. And so, yeah, there's more opportunities. Our team is in Washington and dealing with other governmental agencies routinely as we pitch more opportunities. But the IRS one, just to be fair, is a very big one. Yeah, it's a large one.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Switching gears a little bit, and then we'll go back into some of your business segments. So a big theme of this conference is AI, so a huge, huge topic within info and business services. How are you capitalizing AI? Risk exposure to the business on the other side?

AI is a huge tailwind to the company. I mean, and you may not hear that from every participant here today, but I'll tell you, in our business, it is a tailwind.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

All we'll tell you is a tailwind. Oh, is that right?

Well, let me tell you how it's already a tailwind for us, both on the revenue side and on the profit side. So AI intersects with our business across of it. So on our digital solutions business, AI is enabling us to help unlock dark data for clients where they can now start doing analysis on information that they didn't previously have the ability to. And our DXP platform allows us to do that. So it starts with digitization. We can combine both physical and digital data, which we do for clients. That is a very growing portion of our business. And what we're doing is we're then meta-tagging the information. Our DXP platform has Agentec technology built into it and it enables us to save clients a tremendous amount of cost and reduce labor in what are fairly manually intensive applications. Think like mortgage processing. Well, the IRS example, that's all about manually processed paper tax returns, which people might think it's a nightmare. And there's a huge savings opportunity there. There's more and more digital projects of that sort, and AI is driving our own ability to serve our clients and save them money. In data center, look, we're principally playing in all tier one cloud hyperscale locations. While major hyperscalers are building out very large gigawatt campuses to do training of their models, where are they going to monetize it? They're going to do the inference in cloud locations where latency matters. And that is strength of strength for us. It is another significant use case. In our ALM business, AI is making us more efficient in terms of how we work with the gear that we're bringing in, monetizing it. it's also making us much more opportunity on the volume side because AI, new gear, is creating, in some cases, refresh cycles speeding up, which helps us because we're on the other end of that. We help them with decommissioning the gear. And also, the gear that we'll be decommissioning over the next few years is higher price generally than what we've been decommissioning. So there's more volume and more price. So AI is a big opportunity for us, and we're monetizing it. And then on the cost side, you know, we have a lot of opportunity that we're executing against. We're in the very early stage of harvesting the benefits. So, for example, you know, because we have a large client base in our core business, we have something on the order of 10 million customer contacts a year. Most of those are voice. And there's still email and chat as well. And like, you know, most every company that has that kind of customer interaction, we did the labor arbitrage on call centers a long time ago. But what AI allows us to do is be much more effective for the client. So like in any call center, we have attrition. You get 15% to 20%. AI makes us get the new representatives up to speed much faster because it can listen to the call. It can read the email in advance and suggest to the human what the response is. We're starting to test things like responding more directly to the client vis-a-vis AI. It makes us more effective in ways like on our procurement side, We're starting to run more and more of our commodity through RFPs that are AI-driven. With 245,000 client relationships, our commercial team responds to a lot of RFPs. It used to be a terrible manual process with many, many humans involved. AI is enabling us to respond to more RFPs faster and more accurately. In our HR area, it helps us do a lot of training and recruitment much more efficiently. And when we're bringing on the sorts of growth rates that we have, we're hiring a lot of people. And so, you know, AI is a big help to us.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Okay, very clear. Go back to the core business records, strong recurring revenue base, you know, cash hub of the business, right? So, you know, in terms of, you know, I think one debate is pushing back on just kind of a legacy business, right? You know, very simply, let's use a paper. So, you know, in terms of Barry, how you think about the sustainability of volume and then pricing, right, in that context, digitization, you know, how would you answer that?

So the business is a phenomenal business. Number one, we've never stored more physical volume than we're storing today. Sometimes people have a hard time imagining that because, as you said, most everybody thinks, well, there's less paper in the economy. Yeah, so let's talk about that some. the stuff we're storing really matters to clients and they've been sending us boxes for literally decades on average and we're not looking for the volume to grow substantially curve you know i've been saying since i've been here like our expectation is for the volume to be flattish to slightly up think like 30 to 40 basis points and that's what we've been doing for the last several years we we've been growing organically year to year quarter to quarter and we know that our inventory that we store for clients it has a natural life cycle it averages about 15 years and it's been at 15 years for a long time so we start every year knowing we got to destroy about five percent of the volume and our commercial team goes out there and wins new business we consolidate business with existing clients uh there's some markets that are still in the early stages of outsourcing and then we get new volume incoming from clients and that's kind of how it works but But let me point out one thing about less paper in the economy. You know, Kurt, when you and I were doing conferences like these like 15 plus 20 years ago, there would have been stacks of analyst notes all around and conference books, tons of paper. Let's look out there. There's none of it. But none of that was coming to us. Clients didn't send us that kind of paper because they didn't need it in the future. No offense to the sell-side community. Today it's all electronic. It's all on the iPad. So we don't get that paper, but we never got that paper. The stuff we get from clients are things that they absolutely need to store because they might need in the future. And those use cases, they aren't changing. You know, there's been levels of digital transformation in the economy for years. We absorbed that like years ago, and we continue to absorb it, and we continue to grow. And the pricing capability we have on the businesses has been proven to be very strong because we offer clients a very, very high value. The offering that we have, which they chose to standardize on years and years ago, is a high one. If you're Bank of America, you're probably sending us boxes from Charlotte, Boston, all over the place. And if you – not that they do this at this stage, but if they wanted to kind of create that sort of relationship with someone else, you'd be talking about straying together literally dozens of vendors because we're the only global player at all. and we're not looking to you know certainly over price we price to value the value we offer is super compelling and we have a lot of additional products and services we can sell to clients like a B of A so you know do we see some elasticity I always say we we absolutely see elasticity it skews generally to our smallest clients and generally speaking that's where we would add the least value Because if you're a two-person firm here in Manhattan, you might be sending us one box a month. You know, you don't care that we can service you in Germany or in Florida. You don't do business there. But for the vast majority of our larger clients, they can't replicate what we have. And they don't want to because they standardize with us for a reason. We give them great service. By the way, the Wall Street Journal had a customer satisfaction survey in the last year or so, which they looked at B2B companies and customer set and they ranked as number one.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Okay, there you go. Maybe just going back to that point before we pick up on another on the dark data, how that fits into record storage and maybe a new vertical.

Yeah, dark data is an interesting one. It's part of the AI tailwind I mentioned that we have, which is clients now through advanced digitization, meta-tagging, our DXP platform, enables us to help them by creating data information that they can then analyze that historically they didn't have the opportunity to. And while clients are, it's still expensive to do that, relatively speaking, there are many use cases and increasingly so as costs come down where we're seeing more and more of that sort of information flow. And so we see a fair number of digital projects every year, a growing number, which is on information that clients are asking us to convert to meta-tagged data that we weren't even storing. So a lot of our digital businesses is essentially either new paper coming into us that may or may not be stored in the future, as opposed to significant amounts of digitization of the inventory we have on the shelf. But we do some deployments of specific project-oriented work of digitization that's on the shelf and the vast majority of the time that goes right back on the shelf by the way okay fair enough um pricing want to go back to that um as you talked about an important uh driver i think across a number of your segments um what are you assuming for this year you know what's the sustainable rate of growth and then again just uh you know generally elasticity you know sounds like it's fairly uh you know concentrated yeah i mean our our view on um on the record side on the core business is you look back about six years ago we said okay we expect the core business growing about a five percent rate we all said that's probably pretty conservative and uh we've been growing about double that for the last you know five years um but you know last year we did about six percent round numbers on average uh pricing and our core business grew a little bit faster and and we you know we've been saying for several years like hey mid-single plus is probably the right place to be that's kind of what we guided to this year i think uh you know there's it's that's a healthy place for us to be because that business requires very little capital to grow and as a result as you described it generates earlier it just generates a tremendous amount of cash and we use that to go deploy into other parts of business principally data center pricing in our other areas of our business on digital i'd say you know we do compete with a variety of competitors in that space so that's you know the pricing is is is slightly up but not as as strong as in the core business in the data center side of the equation and we have a colo business and we have a hyperscale business our colo business is sort of um you know in place and we renew you know call it 1500 leases every year we have low churn think like two three four percent and mark the market's been like double digit for years now for several years so it's very good double digit and then on the hyperscale side pricing has been rising some over the last few years frankly costs have too so the cash on cash on leopard return is how we kind of think about that business on on hyperscale deployments and that's been run in the 10 11 sometimes you see a return that's a little bit higher than that but we love that business because it's a the hyperscale businesses you're talking about investment grade clients you're talking about leases that are 10 to 15 years in duration and it's a pre-lease business for us we don't generally speculatively build so we generally are looking at signing a contract with a hyperscaler you know for let's say 10-15 years uh before we principally put the shovel in the ground and that is a um that is a really effective capital deployment strategy for us in the ALM business it's uh we're you know on the commodity side it's it's you know it's what it is yeah it's as the market goes.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

And you're not wildcatting for data sellers?

Fair enough.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

So, yeah, I guess sticking on the records business, digital solutions, maybe just talk a little bit more, about the synergies between the two and then, you know, again, just, you know, how big that business is and kind of where you expect rates of growth.

In digital. So the digital businesses last year, as I mentioned earlier, exited the year at a 600 million annualized rate in the fourth quarter um that business has been growing high teens to 20s for quite a while now um the the cross sell is is quite good because nearly all of our clients of size have some level of digitization opportunity and frankly there's lots of other use cases beyond digitization that we're doing and that's a smaller portion of our business now we're doing um automated processes where we're saving clients tremendous amounts by taking uh what is a largely a manual process and doing it in a much more uh efficient means and with high accuracy and big scale and we're seeing that continue to be a larger and larger piece of our recurring business we have a software as a service model inside our digital business our DXP deployments are growing we did a record number of DXP new wins and logos in the fourth quarter we think that business is going to continue to grow at a high rate for a long period of time and that's even before talking about that IRS deal I mentioned so this year we guided to what I think is a conservative posture of 45 million of revenue from the IRS deal in 2026 and we only did 6 million or 7

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

million on that business last year six million in the quarter uh we expect to do over a hundred million in that business line next year so yeah there's a lot of growth in our digital business and it's very synergistic with the core okay fair enough uh the alm the life cycle management business uh touched on a little bit um again very very robust uh outlook i think you said you know largest business or could be um again just you know maybe reiterate kind of why you think it's going to be bigger and you know larger than your core records business uh and then thinking about you know just the the algo right between uh logo expansion you know uh growing wallet with existing

customers uh m&a if that if that's the factor yeah so we and others scope the alm market as being a 35 billion dollar tam so it's a big market and it's also growing why is it growing there's more it gear and frankly you know if you look at the market it segments two ways one is you got enterprise clients like a b of a or you know a whole host of major all the 41 000 would be very good targets for us and uh then you've got the hyperscale business and you know directionally it's like two-thirds to three-quarters enterprise and the balance is hyperscale now the hyperscale side of the business is um more of a revenue share model where we're helping hyperscale clients the same clients we sell to on the data center side, I might add, that we're helping them with the decommissioning of servers that are inside their physical data centers. And the quantum of those servers keeps expanding because the refresh rate is about five years. So that, and as you know, the amount of capital that's been going into data centers has been increasing for quite a while, right? And now that part of the business is a little thinner margin. It's kind of like teens to 20 because it's a revenue share model. So when we decommission servers for the hyperscalers, the first thing we do is wipe anything that's been written to. And that's incredibly important to the hyperscaler clients because that's all about their brand. And so that's a key element of the security and trust part of that relationship. And then we're physically disassembling them and selling off the components into the secondary markets. markets and it's kind of on average like an 80 20 split where the hyperscaler gets 80 percent of whatever we're selling and we get 20 we do gross up the revenue for the whole sale so the actual margin is is relatively low here but it's very incremental business for us and we're doing it increasingly in a more and more profitable way because we're getting cost efficiencies that business i think has got a very clear significant amount of volumetric growth over the next few years as clients continue to decommission and you kind of know the volumes coming because it's all about supply chain right they're not going to decommission something where they don't have the new gear to put right in and so it's a very much a planful kind of area of our business with the clients where it's more concentrated also to be clear on the enterprise side, which is the bigger TAM, we're cross-selling increasingly so from our existing client base. Now, for us, of the $630 million we did in revenue last year in ALM, 60% of it was enterprise and 40% of it was hyperscale. We punch a little bit higher on the hyperscale than the market just because of the more concentrated nature of those clients. On the enterprise side, though, Kurt, we are in, I think, probably like the first inning, maybe just getting up to bat on the opportunity for cross-sell. I'll give it to you like this. We have 95% of the Fortune 1000 as a customer. When we started last year, we had about 270 of them using us for some bit of ALM. We exited the year at like 360, so we picked up 90 new logos. But we're not penetrated anywhere close to full penetration with any of them. We're very early stage, and it's very much a land and expand type of situation because we're offering them something that is a replacement of a whole string of vendors across their network because, as I said earlier, it's a really fragmented market. And so you've got major corporates and even financial institutions that are sending IT gear that has PII, confidential information, et cetera, to lots of small little mom-and-pop vendors around there. Why do they do that today? because that's the only thing they've had to be able to send it to. So our view is we're going to stitch together a global model like we did on records, and we're going to offer major corporates something that is super valuable to them, which is all about chain of custody, security, privacy, compliance. And this is a secularly growing part of the economy, and it is a secularly more important part of the economy to like CIOs and CISOs, etc. in the future because, you know, as we all know, PII, Confidential Information, you probably want a compliance certificate from somebody like an Iron Mountain as opposed to a $30 million or $40 million vendor. In addition, we augment our organic growth through tucking in some small acquisitions. They're small because I said all the players that we're competing with, for the most part, are very tiny players. But it tucks in really well. We're buying those businesses at a five to eight times trailing EBITDA. It's synergized down below four fast. and it means it's a means to both extend our capability but also get in the door with certain clients to start doing that expansion it's a great business the margins are like 20s to 30s so it's it's not as strong a margin as our records business but the the quantum of the opportunity is much larger the ham for this business is much much bigger yeah and you know Corollary or a similar playbook to your point. It's very similar to the way the team here rolled up the records business over the years. You know, you go back 30 years ago, our records business, 40 years ago, was like a $3 million, $5 million revenue business annually. And over time, the team grew it and grew it and grew it and created an offering that was super compelling to corporate clients. And that's what we're aiming to do in ALM, Kurt.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Okay, fair enough. And then maybe just going back to the hyperscaler business, exposure in terms of component pricing memory, I guess what is the exposure, market dynamics, how to think about for this year, and then, again, just think about the longer term.

I'm going to give a little bit of context and then come right to your question. So when we are decommissioning for the hyperscalers, as I said, the first thing we generally do is wipe anything that's been written to. In some cases, we wipe it twice. and then we're disassembling. So we're selling CPUs, drives, memory, et cetera. Memory, and again, this is 40% of our ALM business. Memory, quarter to quarter, it can move around a little bit, but it's about 40 to 50% of that revenue that we do. So it's the lion's share of what we're doing. And after that, it's like the drives and CPUs, et cetera. And of course, this is all used gear, just to be clear. And so we have varying generations of what we're decommissioning based on what the client is sending. Memory pricing, as it feels like everybody knows, has been pretty inflationary. Part of that is driven by there's a supply-demand and balance for new. And there's also less capacity for certain generations of memory that's still very much needed, like DDR4. And so, as I said in December at a financial conference and then as we reported on our most recent call, look memory prices moved up pretty appreciably on the used side in in the later part of the year it was tight on new throughout the year but really kind of get it to use more later in the year and secondary prices are continue to be high and so you know we share in that through the revenue share model that I mentioned to you earlier and in the fourth quarter look you know as compared to when we gave guidance at the very beginning of November to the end of the quarter we picked up about 15 and $16 million additional business because of memory pricing. And, you know, the thing to be aware of is pricing is continuing to be high. You know, I don't tend to try to prognosticate pricing because, you know, it can move around. But the folks that do suggest that there's going to be a simple high demand imbalance for at least, you know, this year, if not throughout all the next year. So I think pricing is probably going to continue to be pretty good. But we were, you know, and I hope we'll prove to be conservative with respect to how we guided because we just basically rolled the current price at that time that we saw. But, you know, the other thing to watch out, and I mentioned this in December too, so I'll reiterate it, is, you know, the hyperscaler is only going to decommission if they have the new gear already here. And they have a line of sight for any other gear that they need. And so, you know, as I said in December, we saw some clients that were delaying a little bit on DCOM because they wanted to make sure they had line of sight for the new supply chain. And we've seen them do that before in other, well, in the supply chain crisis. And, you know, I feel very good about that business, just to be clear. I think it's biased for upside if you're going to, you know, ask me one way or the other. and that's because of both the pricing as well as our organic volume.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Got it. Maybe just touching on data centers again. So, you know, touch us a little bit, but in terms of, you know, what you're guiding in terms of, you know, megawatt capacity or, you know, usage, I suppose, just how you're feeling about the overall pipeline and you touched on this a little bit ago, market moving or shifting to inference. What does that mean for Iron Mountain?

So we generally are making our data center platform in all tier one kind of markets for cloud and therefore inference in the future and now and in the future. And so if you look at our business, Kurt, we've signed about, on average, 100 megawatts of new leasing each of the last four years. It's average.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Last year was a little bit lower. It was in the low 60s.

We did 40-something megawatts in the fourth quarter. part of the reason we were lower last year is we had sold so much in the prior three years that we were constructing, that we didn't have near-end power coming to market that we could sell. The reason why we guided to, you know, at least 100 megawatts of new leases this year, and that is bolstered based on the fact that our pipeline activity has meaningfully increased. As compared to this time last year, it's up a lot. Now, it kind of should be because if you look at it, we're lucky enough to have a portfolio of energizing land that's coming. And, you know, in the next 18 months or so, we will energize 200 megawatts that is currently unsold. And then in the next 24 months, we'll do like 400 megawatts. And beyond that, we have another nearly 300 megawatts to energize out beyond that time frame. So we've got a lot of very, very good available capacity coming to sell, and generally speaking, we see the hyperscalers kind of leasing like 12 to 18 months before the energization process, which works really well with our model because we can get the pre-lease from one of these investment-grade clients before we really have to do any significant construction. You've got line of sight. Line of sight, and at good returns.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Okay, terrific. Um, we're running tight on time here. So maybe just, um, capital allocation, a favorite of yours, I think. Um, so in terms of just outlook for this year, cashflow priorities, uh, how should we think about leverage and then just deployment, dividend growth, stuff like that?

Yeah, there's a bunch in there. So I'll try to go fast. Um, our operating cashflow, this is another big tailwind in our business, is increasing at quantums that are substantial, uh, this year and going forward. You know, like last year, we had nearly $200 million of cash restructuring charges, and they're gone. You know, that's over. So that right there is a big step up, plus obviously the EBITDA, the business is growing really fast, and much of that's coming out of businesses that are very capital-like. So we'll probably do somewhere between like $1.5 and $2 billion of operating cash flow this year, Kurt, and we still have a lot of working capital opportunity going forward together with growth. So to give you a sense at the midpoint of that, that would be up like 400 plus million year on year on the operating cash flow side. Unlike a lot of data centers, we have retained cash flow from our core business. And that we will plow into covering incremental data center development. So a couple other parts of the capital allocation story. We target a low 60s percent of AFFO for our dividend. And so the last four years, we've grown the dividend about 10% each of those years. And we have guided to AFFO being growing another double digit. So in light of the fact that we have no intention to move off that payout range, you could expect the dividend to continue to grow. And we're using what I think is a prudent, probably prudent, if not low leverage level of five times as a REIT. And principally, you know, a few years ago, we were closer to six times. We brought it down last year. We ended at 4.9 times. We haven't been that low in well over a decade. And we aim to kind of be right there. And with that, with the retained cash flow and the growth of EBITDA, we have plenty of capital to deploy to build out those data centers.

Kurt Nagel Analyst — BofA

Great. Good way to end.

Good to see you, Kirk.

Analyst Q&A · 1 question
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