Marc Ganzi is an American entrepreneur, investor, and business executive who serves as Chief Executive Officer of DigitalBridge, a global alternative asset manager specializing in digital infrastructure. Best known for founding Global Tower Partners and later co-founding Digital Bridge Holdings, the specialist investment platform that helped shape today’s DigitalBridge, Ganzi has spent more than three decades building and investing in the physical infrastructure that underpins the digital economy.
Long before data centers became one of commercial real estate’s fastest-growing asset classes, Ganzi was among the early entrepreneurs to recognize the long-term investment potential of communications infrastructure. From wireless towers in the early days of mobile technology to hyperscale data centers powering cloud computing and artificial intelligence, his career has been defined by identifying infrastructure trends before they became mainstream.
Today, Marc Ganzi is one of the most influential figures in digital infrastructure investing, helping to channel institutional capital into the real estate that supports an increasingly connected world.
Early Career
After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, Ganzi entered the communications infrastructure industry during a period of rapid technological change. He first co-founded Apex Site Management before launching Global Tower Partners in 2003, building the business into one of the largest privately owned wireless tower companies in the United States.
American Tower Corporation acquired Global Tower Partners’ parent company in 2013 in a transaction valued at approximately $4.8 billion, establishing Ganzi as one of the industry’s leading entrepreneurs and providing the foundation for his next venture.
Building DigitalBridge
Following the sale of Global Tower Partners, Marc Ganzi turned his attention to a broader opportunity. He believed that wireless towers represented just one part of a much larger digital infrastructure ecosystem that would increasingly include fiber networks, small-cell infrastructure and data centers.
In July 2019, Colony Capital acquired Digital Bridge Holdings, bringing Ganzi’s investment platform into the publicly traded real estate company. After becoming Chief Executive Officer in July 2020, Ganzi led a major transformation of the business, divesting non-core assets and repositioning the company as a dedicated digital infrastructure investment manager. Colony Capital was subsequently rebranded as DigitalBridge in 2021, reflecting its new strategic direction.
Today, DigitalBridge is one of the world’s leading digital infrastructure investment managers, partnering with pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors to finance the growth of critical digital assets around the world.
Investing in Data Center Real Estate
Although DigitalBridge invests across the wider digital infrastructure sector, data centers have become one of the firm’s defining areas of focus under Ganzi’s leadership.
Rather than concentrating on individual properties, DigitalBridge has built its strategy around investing in leading operating platforms capable of developing and scaling data center capacity across multiple markets. This approach has enabled the firm to participate in the sector’s long-term growth while providing operators with the capital needed to expand internationally.
Over the years, DigitalBridge has backed several of the industry’s leading data center platforms, including Vantage Data Centers, DataBank, Scala Data Centers, AtlasEdge, and Switch. Together, these businesses develop and operate facilities serving hyperscale cloud providers, enterprise customers, and, increasingly, AI-driven workloads across North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Under Ganzi’s leadership, DigitalBridge has become one of the world’s largest dedicated managers of digital infrastructure capital, raising billions of dollars to invest across data centers, wireless towers, fiber networks and edge infrastructure.
Leadership and Industry Influence
Marc Ganzi is widely recognized for helping bridge the worlds of real estate, infrastructure, and technology investing. Through DigitalBridge, he has championed an investment strategy centered on building and scaling specialist operating platforms, helping institutional investors gain exposure to digital infrastructure through established businesses rather than standalone assets.
His influence extends beyond DigitalBridge through board positions and leadership roles across the digital infrastructure industry. More broadly, he has helped shape how institutional investors view communications infrastructure, contributing to the emergence of data centers as a core component of modern real estate portfolios.
Personal Life
Outside of business, Ganzi is an accomplished polo player and longtime supporter of the sport. He and his wife, Melissa Ganzi, are active in the international polo community and are based in Wellington, Florida.
While he maintains a relatively private personal life, Marc Ganzi’s influence on digital infrastructure investing has made him one of the defining figures in the evolution of data center real estate.
