IRM Iron Mountain Incorporated

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$105.50

Iron Mountain Incorporated Q3 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Rocco
Conference Operator
Good morning and welcome to the Iron Mountain Third Quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star than zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star than one on your telephone keypad, and to withdraw your question, please press star than two. We will limit analysts to one question and you can rejoin the queue. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Rupe, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Mark Rupe
Senior Vice President of Investor Relations
Thanks, Rocco. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining us today are Bill Meaney, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Barry Hytinen, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we'll open the lines for Q&A. Today's call will include forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of the major risk factors that could cause the actual results to differ from these statements, please refer to today's earnings materials, including the Safe Harbor language on slide two of the earnings presentation, and our annual and quarterly reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. Each of these items, as well as reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures referenced during this call, can be found on our investor relations website.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
With that, I'll turn the call over to Bill. Thank you, Mark, and thank you all for joining us today to discuss our third quarter results. We are pleased to report that our team delivered another exceptional performance in the third quarter with record-breaking results, surpassing our expectations across all key metrics. Revenue increased 13% on both a reported and an organic basis, and adjusted EBITDA and AFFO grew 13% and 17% respectively. These outstanding results continue to underscore the enduring strength and synergies of our traditional records business and portfolio of growth businesses driven by our team's commitment to creating customer value coupled with disciplined operational execution. Let me share some of the highlights from the quarter, starting with data center-related performance. In our data center business, we drove 34% revenue growth with impressive profitability expansion, and we achieved record quarterly leasing of 102 megawatts and increased our revenue backlog to $575 million. And in our data center decommissioning business within asset lifecycle management, our team drove double-digit revenue growth. We also saw strength in our performance related to our enterprise customers. Enterprise ALM grew more than 60% in the quarter, continuing its strong trend in benefiting from cross-selling, increased penetration, and expanded footprint. Our digital solutions business achieved another record quarter of revenue, whilst continuing to earn analyst recognition for our AI-powered Insight DXP platform and its intelligent document processing capabilities, whether on physical or digital borne information. Our physical storage business grew mid single digits in this tracking towards its 38th consecutive year of organic storage rental growth. And operationally, our margin expansion efforts across each of our businesses together with our team's focus on expense discipline resulted in a strong adjusted EBITDA margin of 37.6%. Based on these strong results, We are pleased to increase our full-year financial outlook. We continue to build operational scale and our commercial efforts are focused on strategic cross-selling to further expand the top-line contribution from our growth businesses of data center, enterprise ALM, data center decommissioning, and digital. These high growth businesses have continued to exceed our targets and represent an increasingly large portion of our total revenue as well as our total addressable market of $170 billion. This underwrites our ability to sustain double digit top and bottom line growth well into the future. In 2026, we expect our growth businesses to represent more than one third of total revenue and contribute 11 of the 16 percentage points of consolidated growth with the remaining five points coming from our highly recurring and high margin traditional record storage business. Based on our strong performance in 2026 and continued positive outlook, our board of directors has authorized an increase of our quarterly dividend by 15%. Now let me share some of the wins from the quarter that illustrate the commercial success across industry verticals, including the public sector, where we delivered our second best bookings quarter in our history and have grown bookings 40% year to date compared to last year. Contributing to the booking success in the third quarter was a key win in records management. In the U.S., a new customer within the federal government selected Iron Mountain for a three-year, $25 million contract to support a complex, multi-site relocation of federal records as part of its real estate optimization and efficiency efforts. Iron Mountain was chosen based on its long history of operational execution for the federal government. We also saw success in the private sector, winning a multi-million dollar 10-year contract with a Fortune 100 customer to provide highly secure climate-controlled storage and premium archival services. In digital solutions, we continue to see strong momentum for our Insight DXP platform with significant growth in the number and average size of deals. Our recent wins demonstrate how customers are using DXP to turn unstructured information, whether in physical or digital form, into insights for improving operations, strengthening governance, and enabling AI. Some examples are, in the Middle East, we signed a multi-year contract with a government for our largest DXP deployment to date, supporting the nation's flagship government digital transformation initiative. DXP will serve as the standardized digital platform underpinning this initiative with a planned rollout across 30 government agencies. The win underscores how DXP paired with a compliant sovereign cloud architecture and strong local ecosystem partners enables us to unlock significant value from unstructured government data. I would also like to highlight that Standard Charter Bank, a longstanding customer recently deployed our DXP platform in Singapore, the first phase of a broader rollout across its Asia-Pacific operations. As one of the largest enterprise-scale implementations in the region, DXP will replace a legacy enterprise content management, or ECM, platform and enable Standard Chartered to serve customer accounts with greater speed and agility while strengthening its information governance and reducing regulatory risks. Now let me highlight some of our data center wins. We had an outstanding data center performance in the third quarter, bringing our year to date leasing to 137 megawatts. We also expanded our customer base in the quarter, adding our second new hyperscale relationship this year. In India, we signed 74 megawatts, including 51 in Mumbai and 23 in Chennai. India is quickly becoming a major hyperscale data center market, and we are well positioned as one of the top developers. We also fully leased our 25 megawatt London 3 asset and leased approximately 3 megawatts to enterprise customers in the quarter. Building on this success, we are well positioned to sustain our momentum with approximately 325 megawatts of leaseable capacity expected to energize within the next 24 months. Industry demand remains incredibly strong and our pipeline of activity on each of our key sites continues to be very high. Turning to our asset lifecycle management business, we continue to successfully execute our strategy of scaling our global capabilities, broadening our customer base through cross-selling initiatives into our 240,000 customers, and growing our business within existing customers. In the third quarter, we won several deals across our ALM businesses. In North America, we secured an agreement with a leading global consulting firm whereby Iron Mountain will become its sole partner for its secure IT asset disposition. This important cross-sell win follows a highly successful six-month pilot and delivers measurable value across risk mitigation, sustainability, operational efficiency, and financial recovery. We also want to deal with a global financial institution to assist in its data center decommissioning program to capitalize on high-value financial recovery by harvesting and reselling components. Our market-leading position around data security and best-in-class remarketing platform were key determinants of securing the deal. And we want to deal with a leading technology manufacturer to perform secure IT asset destruction services of high-value server components replacing regional ITAT competitors in in-house processing. Iron Mountain was chosen based on its existing relationship, industry reputation, and secure chain of custody. In conclusion, our performance in 2026 has been outstanding, and we have a clear view for sustained long-term growth as we are still in the early phases of our growth journey. We look forward to sharing more about our longer-term plans and an investor meeting in Sightour in early March. I want to extend my sincere thanks to Mountaineers across the world for their steadfast dedication to serving our more than 240,000 customers. With that, I'll turn the call over to Barry.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Bill, and thank you all for joining us to discuss our results. As you've heard today, our team delivered strong growth across each of our businesses in the third quarter. Revenue of $1.99 billion was up $237 million year-on-year and ahead of the projection we provided on our last call. As compared to last year, revenue increased 13% on both a reported and organic basis. We saw continued strong growth in our ALM and data center businesses and delivered record results in our digital solutions and traditional records businesses. Adjusted EBITDA was ahead of our projections at $748 million, up 13%, or $88 million year-on-year, and $21 million versus the second quarter. I am especially pleased with our team's operational execution, which resulted in our adjusted EBITDA margin expanding nearly 200 basis points sequentially. EBITDA margin was also consistent with the prior year, which is noteworthy given the strong growth in our services revenue that naturally drives a mixed headwind. AFFO of $458 million was up $65 million, or 17% as compared to last year. And AFFO on a per-year basis was $1.53, up 16% to last year, and was 6 cents ahead of the projection we provided on our last call. Both of these are new record highs for us. Now, turning to segment performance. In our global RIM business, third quarter revenue of $1.4 billion grew $94 million as compared to last year. Segment growth was 7% on both a reported and organic basis. This was driven by strong growth across both our storage and service businesses. On a reported and organic basis, storage revenue was up 5%. Adjusting for the data management one-time benefit that we called out last year, storage revenue growth was particularly impressive, exceeding 7%. Now, this is the highest growth rate the team has delivered on that line in over two years. Global RIM service revenue grew 10% and was up 9% on an organic basis. Our digital solutions business delivered another record quarter of revenue. We drove continued strength in our core services. From a profitability perspective, global room adjusted EBITDA increased $32 million to a record $630 million, representing a 44% margin. Turning to our global data center business, we achieved revenue of $274 million in the third quarter, an increase of $69 million, or 34% year-on-year driven by lease commencements and strong pricing. Year-to-date, we have leased 137 megawatts including 102 in the third quarter. With our strong new leasing in India, I want to provide our investors some context on this market. First, as you might expect, leasing rates are below our portfolio average. Correspondingly, our development costs are also meaningfully below our portfolio average. Most importantly, the returns we are underwriting in India are among our highest development yields globally. We commenced 58 leases totaling 29 megawatts in the quarter. Additionally, we renewed 168 leases totaling 9 megawatts with continued strong pricing spreads of 10 and 15% on a cash and gap basis respectively. I'll just also note that pricing is trending up across our portfolio as hyperscale demand for cloud and inference capacity continues to grow faster than supply. Third quarter data center adjusted EBITDA was $154 million, up $47 million year on year, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 56.3%, up 370 basis points to last year. The margin expansion was driven by a greater number of commencements this year and overall expense efficiency. Turning to asset lifecycle management, total ALM revenue was $241 million, an increase of $72 million, or 43% year over year. On an organic basis, our team grew revenue by $64 million, or 38%. This exceeded our expectations driven by both our enterprise and decommissioning channels. Our enterprise ALM business continued its strong trajectory, growing greater than 50% organically. This growth was achieved through increased penetration of existing customers and the addition of new wins. As we discussed on prior calls, we see the enterprise business as a multi-billion dollar opportunity as we cross-sell into our very large customer base and expand our global reach. In our data center decommissioning business, The team drove low double-digit growth, which was ahead of our expectations and impressive in light of the $30 million revenue shift we discussed on our August call. Adjusting for the shift, our third quarter decommissioning growth would have been in excess of 50%. From a profitability perspective, our ALM business continued to show solid improvement in contribution year over year, driven by our enterprise ALM business and acquisition synergies. Thank you for joining us. Based on our continued strong growth, we now project ALM revenue to be modestly ahead of $1 billion for the full year. Now turning to cash flow on a consolidated basis. Year-to-date operating cash flow is $1.2 billion, up $364 million from last year. This marks the best year-to-date operating cash flow the company has ever achieved. Free cash flow improved nearly $400 million year-to-date as compared to prior year. This significant increase was driven primarily by growth in our business, improved cash conversion cycle, and the conclusion of our Matterhorn restructuring, which was $152 million during the first nine months of 2025 and zero this year. Turning to capital allocation, as our investors know, our focus is on investing in high return opportunities that drive double digit growth. and growing our dividend while maintaining our strong balance sheet. In light of our performance in 2026 and outlook for AFFO, our board increased our quarterly dividend by 15% to 99.3 cents per share effective with the January payout. This represents the fifth increase of the dividend in the past four years and aligns with our commitment of growing the dividend in line with AFFO per share and maintaining a payout ratio of low 60s percent. Thank you for joining us. We've had on this metric since prior to the company's REIT conversion in 2014. And now as it relates to our outlook for the full year 2026. Based on our strong third quarter performance and positive outlook, we are raising our financial guidance for the year. For the full year 2026, we expect total revenues to be within the range of $7.95 to $8.02 billion, which represents year-on-year growth of 16% at the midpoint. This is nearly $300 million ahead of our initial guidance with upside across our business, roughly half of which is from ALM and the other half coming from Data Center and Global RIM. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be within the range of $2.948 to $2.978 billion, which represents year-on-year growth of 15% at the midpoint. We expect AFFO to be within the range of $1.78 to $1.80 billion or $5.94 to $6 on a per share basis, which are up 16% and 15% respectively at the midpoints. Now, turning to the fourth quarter, we expect revenue of approximately $2.03 billion, an increase of 10% to the fourth quarter of last year. and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $780 million, an increase of 11% year-over-year. We expect AFFO of approximately $473 million, increase of 10% to last year, or $1.57 per share. I will note that our updated guidance absorbs the negative impact resulting from the stronger U.S. dollar since our last earnings call. Thank you for joining us. Our team has achieved outstanding year-to-date results, delivering strong double-digit revenue and earnings growth with record-setting performance across our business. With that, I want to express my sincere gratitude to all of our Mountaineers for their continued dedication to serving our customers and executing on our growth plans. And with that, operator, would you please open the line for Q&A?
Rocco
Conference Operator
Of course. Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will limit analysts to one question and you can rejoin the queue. Today's first question comes from George Tong at Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
George Tong
Analyst, Goldman Sachs
Hi, thanks. Good morning. You noted that India data center development yields are among the highest globally. Can you quantify the yield premium relative to the portfolio and compare the capital intensity of these projects with the broader portfolio?
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, George. Good morning, and thanks for the question. I'll ask Barry to comment on the specific returns, but first, we're really excited about the traction that our Indian portfolio is getting, as you noted, to lease both in Mumbai and Chennai this quarter. It's been a huge win for the team, so I want to kind of thank them for all that. I think that just to give you the underlying foundation is the The leasing rates in India are lower than they are in some other geographies, but the construction costs and delivery costs of the data center is a lot lower. So the result is this is amongst our highest yielding assets across our portfolio. But Barry, you probably want to comment a little bit further.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Hi, George. I would tell you that on the build cost, of course, it naturally depends on the relative project, whether it be in India or Thank you for having me. Thank you. And our next question today comes from Eric Lupko at Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.
Eric Luebchow
Analyst, Wells Fargo
Thanks for the question. Two, if I may. So first on the data center side, obviously given the midterms and kind of the broad pushback we're seeing on a lot of data center development, maybe you could talk a little bit about whether that's having any impact on your development pipeline. And does that change at all how you underwrite perhaps powered land additions that you may be looking at in the future? And then secondly, I just wanted to touch on Enterprise ALM. I believe, you know, start of the year, you were targeting about 25% organic growth. It's been, you know, more than double that, I believe, year to date. So maybe you could talk about whether that's coming from better volume, better customer penetration and cross selling, or there's a pricing element in there as well. Thank you.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
Morning, Eric. Let me start with your data center question. So we feel like we're really well positioned. I mean, first of all, the 325 megawatts that we refer to that's energizing over the next 24 months, that's all fully permitted and energized. It's in some of the best markets, not just across the United States, like our Richmond site, for example, but it's also across the globe. We were just talking about India, how good we feel about that. India is a very fertile place to actually build data centers. You can't speak to a chief minister of a state without them bringing up and asking what they can do to help us develop faster and more in their various states across the country. We feel really good in terms of the positioning we're in. And as a company, I'm not saying that we are specific, but because of our records management business, we have very good contacts at the local level in most of the parts that we operate. And we operate almost in every state across the United States. And we've always been seen as a good local partner. And that's where it all starts. But we feel... The assets that we already have fully permitted and energized over the next period in the land bank that we have coming in after that, we feel that we're really well positioned. Barry, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about the specific returns. One thing I would say just before handing it over to Barry on the ALM side is that We feel really good about the positioning that we're building or the position we're building in the whole ALM space, both on the data center decommissioning segment as well as on the enterprise. And we expect that to carry into next year in terms of having... Thank you for joining us. We're forecasting that that's going to maintain as we go into 2027. So when we think about 25% growth, organic growth next year in the ALM segment, obviously we're saying that that's all volumetrically, assuming that the price levels stay flat, which is our expectation. But Barry, you may want to talk about this year a little bit more closely.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Eric, the drivers on the enterprise growth are all of the above that you mentioned. As we look at the opportunity there, it is immense. We see the enterprise ALM businesses being a multi-billion dollar revenue business for us and it is going to be driven off of the fact that we've got a really large client base that cross-sells extraordinarily well and we are building a solution which we think clients cannot get from anybody else in the marketplace, where we will have a global reach, consistent process, chain of custody, ability to securely handle the material, wipe as needed, and really give them a very strong value proposition. And that is winning. And that is a business whereby we kind of... initially take a position at a client and land there and then expand through the ability to show them that the service that we're offering is incredibly valuable. And so as that secularly continues to grow, I think that business for us is going to underpin very significant growth in our total ALM business. To Bill's point, we're certainly planning for Thank you for having me. We continue to see very good returns that we're underwriting to. As we've traditionally said, low double digits, so 10%, 11%, 12% cash on cash on levered returns in the In the, you know, principal markets that we operate in, as I just mentioned, in response to George's question a little bit higher, obviously, in India, I will tell you this pricing continues to rise both on renewals as well as in the broader marketplace. And that's more than offsetting labor and other costs inflation. So we feel very good about where we're positioned. And I'll just tell you that, as I've said before, The commencements that we have coming in light of where we've been writing returns to and the markets that we're going to be opening on the data center side going forward, those commencements will continue to drive a significant improvement in profit going forward. And so I think the opportunity for us is to, as we said before, continue over time to expand our data center margins quite nicely, both from from an underwriting standpoint as well as from operating expense leverage. Thank you.
Rocco
Conference Operator
Thank you. Our next question today comes from Tomer at Truist. Please go ahead.
Tobey Sommer
Analyst, Truist
Thank you. I wanted to hear your perspective on ALM in the competitive nature of the market. How are you approaching it and how do you feel like you're positioned both Organically and inorganically to take market share over the near and medium term.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
Good morning, Toby. Thanks for the question. So let me start with the organic and then I'll ask Barry to comment on the inorganic or anything else that he wants to add in terms of flavor. So I think that as you start seeing in our results is and many, many more. A big part of that is actually driven by gaining share because if you think about our platform and we called it out in a couple of our wins is we have a unique both brand and the capabilities that back that brand about data security and safety in terms of when people come to us, they know that the Iron Mountain brand stands behind making sure that there's no inadvertent data disclosure as we're actually repurposing that equipment. Cleansing it or even recycling the components. So I think our brand reputation, especially in the enterprise segment, really stands out and we're gaining capacity on that. The other part is we're building an ecosystem as we build that as we already have a market leading position and we're continuing to build that, albeit in a fragmented space. Because do you think the other part is, is we help people actually gain additional financial value? Thank you for joining us. is why we feel like even with flat pricing next year, we expect that business to grow 25% organically, really based on the strength of the ecosystem we're building around that business. But Barry, you probably want to talk about the acquisition side of it.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Toby, I would reiterate some of the points we've made in the past is that we have a concerted effort to be in touch with and conducting diligence on opportunities. We will expect to continue to supplement growth through very accretive kind of tuck-in acquisitions that further expand our global scale and drive operating leverage and really result in synergies, both revenue synergies and cost synergies. When I look across the recent enterprise ALM acquisitions we've done, you know, In that case, it started with the team at Regency, which is just a phenomenal acquisition for us and gave us a capability that is unmatched in the U.S. And then I think about what we've acquired and brought in the team in Australia as well as in Ireland. And we also acquired a couple other small tuck-ins in the U.S., and As you know, recently we acquired in Europe a couple of times. All of these are relatively small deals where we're paying multiples of trailing EBITDA, kind of like call it, you know, five, six to seven, eight times max. And they all synergize down very rapidly to below five times. And we have driven considerable growth of revenue and earnings in every case. and we continue to see that opportunity to be quite significant. I think our corporate development team over the last year or two has been in touch with over 300, if you will, targets and that doesn't mean that we're apt to acquire all of those, but we want to be the acquirer of choice in this market and we think we are in a very advantaged position and as we stitch together a global reach of our own organic capacity and acquiring great operators, which are every single one of the acquisitions I just alluded to were founder-led and we successfully brought their teams on to our business. We think we've got a huge opportunity for additional growth to be both organic and supplemented inorganically. Thank you.
Rocco
Conference Operator
Thank you. Our next question today comes from Kevin McVey at UBS. Please go ahead.
Kevin McVeigh
Analyst, UBS
Great. Thank you so much, and thank you for all the commentary. I don't know if you, Bill, are very alluded to maybe adding a hyperscaler on the data center side. I thought you served the hyperscalers. Was that more the India opportunity, or maybe help us understand that comment, and then is it the same hyperscalers you're serving in North America as and India as well, and just maybe to go to market motion there.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Hey, Kev, the phone was a little crackly at the beginning, so maybe you could repeat the first part. Sure, Barry. Sorry about that.
Kevin McVeigh
Analyst, UBS
It's just basically, did you add a first scaler this quarter, or was it the same? I thought maybe Bill had mentioned a new one.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
I just wanted to clarify that point. Okay. Thanks, Kevin. I think I got your question now. So, yeah, you're asking about the – we mentioned that this year or this quarter we've added two new hyperscale logos. So, first of all, there's roughly 10 to 15, what I would say, large cloud players that are – depends on who you ask, but let's say there's in the order of around 10 hyperscale customers that all of us in the data center space have. serve in various capacities. And so we serve more than half of those in terms of if you look at our portfolio. So it is right to say that over 90% of our leasing activity is to hyperscalers. If you look at our trailing basis in terms of what's actually leased and operating, it's less than that because obviously when we started off, we had a much larger portfolio enterprise. But going forward, over 90% of our leasing is in the hyperscale place, which is the reason why you see these larger deployments. What we were calling out is in this particular quarter, we've added two new hyperscale logos, if you will, or customers. But we were already serving more than half of, say, the global 10 hyperscalers before we added those two.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
And I'll just add, Kevin, that the pipeline that we have lined up against our Assets across the globe, you know, as you know, we have power energizing over the next few periods and some incredibly high priced, very strong data center markets like Northern Virginia and across the globe, including, as we mentioned, a good amount of additional capacity coming in India. So we feel very good about the pipeline and it's Thank you. Our next question today comes from Brendan Lynch at Barclays. Please go ahead. Hi, thank you for taking the question. This is Annabelle on for Brendan.
Annabelle
Analyst, Barclays
Can you share some details on your cost savings efforts that were able to offset the mixed headwind to your EBITDA margins and any future opportunities for additional cost savings going forward?
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Sure, Annabelle. Thanks for that. So one, you know, I think our team has always been focused. It's in our DNA on driving productivity and being very cost driven. And so, you know, when I look at the most recent quarter, the team did a Thank you for having me. Thank you very much. And in our more classic global rim operations, we continue to have meaningful opportunity, whether that be in the form of transportation savings, continued real estate moves, which enable us to get to a lower cost to serve, and a lower cost and operating scale within our digital solutions, which continues to be strength of strength. And so from a cost of goods sold standpoint, if you will, I see the opportunity for additional productivity across all lines of business. And then from a SG&A perspective, we're very cost disciplined, as I was mentioning. And I would say various technologies and tools inclusive of AI will continue to allow us to drive a considerable expense productivity. We have literally dozens of projects underway inside the business to significantly reduce our SG&A expense and thereby drive considerable leverage as we continue to grow the top line. That's across all elements of the business, whether it be in our customer care organization, which is doing a great job and also driving costs, and our procurement team is reaching to... Thank you for joining us. and we will continue to get cost efficiency on the corporate side as well. So I see a lot of opportunity for productivity.
Rocco
Conference Operator
Thank you. Our next question today comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Please go ahead.
Shlomo Rosenbaum
Analyst, Stifel
Hi, thank you very much for taking my question. I have one main and then a couple just for Barry, just tying up some financial stuff. Just Bill, on the government side, can you talk a little bit more about that government contract? I wasn't sure if it was a storage contract or if it's a services contract to move things. And I remember, you know, maybe 12, 13 years ago, Richard Reese talking about, you know, huge opportunity in the government side. And I'm wondering, are you starting to see that open up? And should we start to see a little bit more over there? And I know there's just a huge records sitting there that have potential to be moved. And Just for Barry, the things I want to ask are the impact of FX on 4Q revenue and EBITDA versus the last call, because I think we have some incremental headwinds that would be helpful to call out. And then just what's driving the services gross margin going up 70 basis points sequentially, and you've got labor costs going down. Just give a little bit more operational side what's happening. Thank you.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
Morning, Shlomo, and thanks for the question. I'm sure Richard usually listens to these earnings calls because he's still a major shareholder. So I'll be sure to thank him, you know, for your memory. Anyway, and Richard was right then and he'd be right now. I think to your point, specifically on that project that I called out, it is a service contractor. for the federal government. But it's based on the reputation we've built on not just serving the federal government, but actually storing a lot of their records. In this particular case, we're helping them consolidate their own facilities. And it was really based on the brand and the reliability that we've done on being a service, a storage provider for them. So we're really proud of the reputation that we build in the federal government. But if you take a step back, the thing I was probably most excited about to report on this call is the 40% Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us. on how they can actually change the outcome of their government in terms of the way they serve their citizens, both from a cost and a quality standpoint. So, you know, overall, we're really starting to build a reputation. That particular call out is a service contract, large service contract over the next three years, helping them do what we do routinely in our businesses, consolidate facilities to get more efficiency.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Shlomo, hey, a couple of your follow-ups on the FX impact in the fourth quarter versus the last guide. Obviously, the dollar has been stronger, and we trued up to the relative little bit of incremental weakness that's occurred here recently. So the headwind is like five, could be as much as $10 million to revenue, and I would use your typical margins for us in that regard. That's as compared to the last quarter. and then you asked about the service gross margin being up sequentially. This is largely driven by the fact that we had that large data center decommissioning, which is revenue share oriented, that shifted out of the third quarter into the second quarter. You recall we discussed last quarter that we had a couple of Decommissioning projects for major hyperscalers that they accelerated. We and they were planning to do it in the third quarter, and they moved them forward into the second. That was about $30 million. And so you will see in the storage and service reconciliation that all other service costs are down sequentially related to that. and if you shifted that, that was the point I made in the prepared remarks that our hyperscale data center decommissioning business would have been up in excess of 50% in the third quarter.
Kevin McVeigh
Analyst, UBS
So we were really pleased with the level of activity.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
And then you asked about labor being down on a sequential basis. and this too is where you would see some of that shift happening because as you know we have costs related to the revenue share of actually selling the gear on behalf of our clients but then we also have the labor to do the actual physical decommissioning as well as we drove some additional productivity across the business in labor as I mentioned our operation team is just doing a phenomenal job.
Kevin McVeigh
Analyst, UBS
So yeah, those are those thoughts.
Rocco
Conference Operator
Thank you. Our next question today comes from John Peterson at Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Jonathan Petersen
Analyst, Jefferies
Oh, great. Thank you. A couple data center-related questions. So, obviously, the elections were, I think, a big surprise, at least in terms of the magnitude of it, and it seemed like there was pushback on data centers. Maybe can you talk through some of your land bank portfolio and projects that you have going on in the U.S. right now and any areas where maybe we should think about things getting pushed a little further out because of the permitting process. And then I was also curious on Richmond. It looks like you started those projects on a speculative basis. Just curious your kind of thoughts around that and if you expect to get better returns by sort of building first and leasing closer to completion. Thank you.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, John, for the question. So first of all, the 325 megawatts, as you called out, a big chunk of that is actually Richmond. About two-thirds of that is the Richmond campus. We also have some coming in later in Northern Virginia, but mainly Richmond, India, as well as across Europe. That's all fully permitted, and we have energy committed to those sites. So that 325 megawatts Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. It is kind of in line with the way we normally do that is when you start seeing beyond the site preparation, the construction costs, that's usually very much a pre-lease situation where it's actually tied to a specific contract. And we feel really good about where we stand on that. Obviously, when they lease it, they want to be in that 18 to 24-month window, so we have to do the site preparation ahead of time, and that's what you see in the SRP. And I think more broadly beyond that, in terms of the land bank, you know, we have additional assets behind that, which we have energized commitments already in permitting. It's just outside the 24 months. So I think if you look at the land bank we have right now, we don't see any issues in terms of getting those things approved. I mean, it is probably interesting to note that the states that are probably the most restrictive right now are looking at instituting some more restrictions as Texas, Ohio, and Georgia. We're not developing any sites in those three markets. And then the other thing I would point out is being a global company in 61 countries. And then if you look, we're obviously not in 61 countries for data center, but if you look at our footprint, both in Europe, India, and other places that we're looking around the globe, we feel really well positioned that these types of growth rates, next year will be another 20% plus year for data center. We don't see any slowdown in our ability to continue to grow data center based on the land bank Thank you for joining us.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
As some of our investors are well aware, we have the London asset where we fully leased that asset in the quarter. And some may remember that that was an asset that we originally had leased and was a unique situation where we let a client ship to Chicago. and so the average pricing on that releasing of London is meaningfully up versus the initial time it was leased to the tune of like 25, 30 plus percent. So that is a helpful adder to 2027. And then I would just further note that if we just roll out the entire backlog of what we've already signed, It would, once it fully energizes and developed, will deliver 1.7, nearly 1.8 billion of revenue in a future period on an annual basis. And that's before any additional leasing. That's before any additional pricing. So we feel very, very good about where we are in terms of the operating portfolio and the development portfolio.
Rocco
Conference Operator
Thank you. and our next question today comes from Andrew Steinerman at JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Alex Hess
Analyst, J.P. Morgan
Hi everyone, this is Alex Hess on for Andrew Steinerman. Barry, maybe we want to start with a couple model-oriented questions and maybe a high-level question for you and Bill. On the model side, obviously a nice beat versus your guide on AFFO by about, I think, $18 million, let's call it, and then that's versus a And did you want to give us the high level question as well? I know it's very early to be previewing the preview for the investor event, but any sort of high-level thoughts on what we should be expecting you guys to discuss and where you're going to want to orient the conversation? Presumably there's not some Project Himalaya in the works, but just sort of anything that we should know about You know, you're strategically where you want to sort of position messaging for the investor event.
Bill Meaney
President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Alan. I'll start with the high level and then hand it over to Barry. And he may want to also put a little bit more detail in terms of our investor meeting that we're holding at the beginning of March. I think the high level message is to continue growth in the company and really a focus on Not just the growth portfolio, although that's the part that is the thing that's making the growth easier rather than more difficult, if you will. Because if you think about right now, over a third of our business is in the growth portfolio, growing north of 20%. So as we highlighted, that's providing the bulk of our consolidated growth as a company. The records business is still growing very strong, mid-single digits. and many more. Thank you for joining us. Digital Services and Data Center were less than 15% of the company. It's now more closer to 35% of the company, and it won't be that many years before it's 50% of the company. And we don't see any slowdown in the growth rate of that. So if you think about just the ability to continue to drive the kind of growth and shareholder returns that we've done over the last five years, that's really the theme where we're going to showcase that. and then in terms of there will be a show and tell associated with it in the sense that some people are less familiar with some of our records centers and I think usually when we take investors or people less familiar they're kind of blown away by when they actually see you know the pride of our people in terms of The way they do the job, the way they service the customers, also the innovation we're doing in that business to provide even more value to our customers in terms of the way we store and allow them to access information from even their hard copy records. But we also intend to actually showcase an ALM facility so that you can see a little bit more on when we say ALM, what the actual operations are behind that. We're really looking forward to spend some time with investors. The company has changed a lot over the last 10 years, and we want to give people a chance to both understand that at a high level through commentary that Barry, myself, and some other executives will give, but also to see at least a couple of the businesses up close, which would be the records in ALM business.
Barry Hytinen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Okay. So, Alex, a few questions you had there. As it relates to AFFO, There's a few things. As you pointed out, cash interest was a little bit lower, and that's related to a variety of operational improvements and just getting better efficiencies. So, for example, there's always sort of like timing of when the CapEx disbursements are within a quarter. We've had significantly improved working capital, as I've mentioned on the last slide. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, and then the EBITDA, as you mentioned. So you should expect, naturally, with the fact that we've commenced additional construction across our data center portfolio, that we'll both, of course, have more borrowings as we move forward, and therefore, correspondingly, more interest. But with the timing of data center capital kickoffs, you get a little bit more of the capitalized interest as well. And then from a standpoint of the margin within data center Thank you, Mark. All of that is driving operating efficiencies at the site level together with very good expense management in the business. I think Bill hit the investor event quite well. We're looking forward to telling you about another event. Thank you.
Rocco
Conference Operator
And that does conclude our question and answer session and the Iron Mountain Third Quarter 2026 earnings conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.