Data Center Services Giant Digital Realty to Join S&P 500

Digital Realty Trust, the San Francisco-based global data center provider, will join Dow Jones’s S&P 500, one of America’s most important stock indexes whose health is generally viewed as indicative of the health of the US stock market in general.

Digital (NYSE: DLR) will replace Time Warner Cable on the list, S&P Dow Jones Indices said in a statement. The telco is in the process of being acquired by Charter Communications and will be replaced on May 17.

The San Francisco-based data center REIT will become one of two companies on S&P 500 dedicated solely to providing data center services. The other is Equinix, whose stock was added to the index in March of last year.

“We are gratified to be included in the S&P 500,” John Stewart, senior VP of investor relations at Digital, said in an emailed statement. “Given that the index is designed to be representative of the broader US economy, it’s a remarkable milestone along the data center industry's journey to becoming a mainstream asset class.”

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The index is based on market capitalization of 500 big US companies that trade on NYSE or NASDAQ. It is one of the most widely tracked stock market indices because of the diversity of industries it represents.

S&P 500 includes all major US tech stocks, including internet giants like Microsoft, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook, to IT vendors like HPE, IBM, Cisco, and EMC.

Digital’s stock was up 3.4 percent in after-hours trading Friday evening following the announcement.

Read more: Data Center REITs Scored Big in 2015 Despite Weak Markets