I think every private equity investor or investment manager has the same recurring dream these days. They own their own little slice of today’s massive data center buildout — a product or service that all these new data centers need, proprietary enough for a little competitive moat, strong margins, enormous addressable market … zzzz, smile, snore …

Ecolab’s recent purchase of liquid cooling tech supplier CoolIT Systems for about $4.75 billion, which earned PE firm KKR a 15X return, fuels such dreams.

Other examples abound: Eaton buying Boyd Thermal from Goldman Sachs Asset Management for $9.5 billion to expand its data center offerings; Vertiv buying PurgeRite from Milton Street Capital for about $1 billion; Talen Energy paying Energy Capital Partners about $3.45 billion for 2.6 GW of power generation capacity to support data centers.

The data center boom’s picks-and-shovels businesses have looked rather strong lately. And that’s just one of the reasons we created our day-long Investor Briefing at Data Center World.

So, I’m not promising that every investment manager will see their wildest dreams come true if they attend Data Center World in Washington, D.C., April 20 to 23.

I can say that if investors want a deeper, direct-from-the-source understanding of the data center industry to help inform their investment choices, then there’s no better place than DCW.

It starts with our April 20 Investor Briefing, a day-long lineup of expert speakers exploring the data center industry’s toughest issues — in operations, finance, and technology, and all through a finance lens. The briefing kicks off with a keynote from Switch CFO Madonna Park, then explores emerging tech trends, operational challenges, not-in-my-backyard community concerns, and potential growth opportunities and barriers.

The Data Center World conference also includes the Innovation Challenge, powered by ABB, on April 22, a competition in which 24 startups that serve the data center industry pitch their businesses Shark Tank-style to a panel of investors and advisors.

The rest of the conference, April 21 to 23, is built for the data center industry, by data center industry experts. Investors can learn from 50 conference sessions on the topics that matter most in the industry today — from liquid cooling innovation and the role of nuclear power to construction supply chain woes and federal land development opportunities. All the content comes directly from industry experts, including leaders from hyperscalers AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle; operators such as Aligned, Applied Digital, Compass, CoreWeave, CyrusOne, Metrobloks, Switch, and Viking; and many of the industry’s most innovative and influential service providers. Attendees can also hear directly from data center suppliers explaining their technology in more than 50 Tech Talks and Solution Spotlights.

On the expo floor, investors can visit more than 500 data center industry suppliers, gaining an understanding of the enormous ecosystem that drives this industry.

For investors who want to stop leaning on second-hand information and hear directly from the people developing, building, supplying, and running data centers, Data Center World is the right place to be April 20-23. Register at datacenterworld.com.