James Footh

PGIM Real Estate has appointed James Footh as the managing director for global data centre (DC) investments on its portfolio management team, a role in which he will have transactional and portfolio management responsibilities for all investments made by the company in this sector.

Based in Seattle, Footh will report into Morgan Laughlin, the company’s head of Japan and global head of DC investments.

Footh joins from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where, among other roles, he was responsible for all DC infrastructure development and portfolio oversight of its DCs in the western half of the United States, Canada and the regions of Latin America, Asia-Pacific and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). He brings more than 30 years of real estate experience to the role, having worked for a range of market participants in the US and Europe before joining AWS. 

“The availability of large amounts of low-latency data processing capacity is becoming increasingly critical to the global economy and society as a whole,” Laughlin says. “This trend is driving long-term, sustained growth in demand for DC infrastructure. It also clearly signals the need for real estate investors to incorporate digital infrastructure investment strategies into their global portfolios.” 

“We are addressing this investor need with a dedicated DC investment team pursuing investment structures to grow exposure to this sector globally, and Footh is an important addition to this team.”