Iron Mountain grew Q2 2026 revenue 18.5% to $2.03B (16.8% organic) on 39% data center and 88% ALM growth and swung to a $101M profit, but adjusted EBITDA margin slipped 0.9 pts to 35.8% on mix; full-year guidance raised.
Revenue
$2.0B
+18.5% YoY
Net income
$101M
Diluted EPS
$0.34
Operating margin
18.4%
Overview
Iron Mountain is best known for storing paper records in warehouses, but its growth now comes from three newer businesses: data centers, digital document services, and asset lifecycle management (ALM — collecting, wiping and reselling or recycling old IT equipment). In the second quarter of 2026 (April–June) revenue rose 18.5% to $2,029.1 million, and the company swung to a net profit of $101.4 million attributable to shareholders from a $44.9 million loss a year earlier. Almost all of the growth was organic: stripping out currency moves and acquisitions, revenue grew 16.8%.
The quarter's pattern is fast growth with slightly thinner margins. ALM revenue grew 88%, and ALM earns less on each dollar of revenue than records storage does. Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization, excluding one-off items — a common measure of cash-style operating profit) grew 15.7%, a little slower than revenue, and its margin fell 0.9 points to 35.8%. Management raised its full-year 2026 guidance on every line.
Key metrics
Metric
Q2 2026
Q2 2025
YoY Change
Total revenue
$2,029.1M
$1,711.9M
+18.5%
– Storage rental revenue
$1,134.6M
$1,010.0M
+12.3%
– Service revenue
$894.5M
$702.0M
+27.4%
Organic revenue growth
Read 0 community reports on Iron Mountain, or write your own.Write a report
AFFO (adjusted funds from operations) is the cash-flow measure real estate investment trusts (REITs) use to show what's available for dividends: roughly, earnings with property depreciation added back, minus the routine capital spending needed to maintain the buildings. Operating margin is operating income divided by revenue: the share of revenue left after running the business, before interest and tax. Source: Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026; AFFO, organic growth, data center and leverage figures from the Q2 2026 supplemental financial information (8-K Exhibit 99.3, August 5, 2026).
Why the bottom line swung to a profit
The jump from a $43.3 million net loss to a $106.1 million net profit (before minority-partner shares) is mostly the absence of costs that hit last year, not a sudden step-change in the business:
Restructuring spending ended. Q2 2025 carried $50.3 million of "restructuring and other transformation" costs from Project Matterhorn, a multi-year reorganization program. The 10-Q says the program was completed as of December 31, 2025, so there were none this quarter.
Currency swung from a large loss to a small gain. Foreign-exchange effects on money that Iron Mountain subsidiaries owe each other were an $87.2 million loss in Q2 2025 and a $13.9 million gain this quarter (mainly from euro-to-dollar movements). This line doesn't reflect how the business is running.
A new non-operating loss partly offset that. "Other, net" includes a $41.9 million loss from the change in value of deferred purchase obligations and other deferred payments (amounts still owed on past acquisitions), against a $5.3 million gain a year ago.
Interest costs rose by $18.4 million to $223.4 million because the company borrowed more to fund data center construction. The weighted average interest rate was about flat at 5.6%, against 5.7% a year earlier.
Operating income rose 43.7% to $373.5 million. That's faster than adjusted EBITDA partly because of the missing restructuring charge, although depreciation also rose 11% as new data centers came online. Adjusted EPS, which excludes these items on both sides, rose 25% to $0.60, which is a cleaner read of the underlying improvement.
Segment performance
Segment
Q2 2026 revenue
YoY (organic)
Segment adj. EBITDA
Q2 2025 adj. EBITDA
Margin (Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025)
Global RIM (records & information management)
$1,433.6M
+8.3% (+6.8%)
$620.8M
$586.3M
43.3% vs 44.3%
Global Data Center
$262.9M
+38.8% (+38.7%)
$137.3M
$96.3M
52.2% vs 50.8%
Corporate & Other (includes ALM)
$332.6M
+67.4% (+63.0%)
−$31.1M
−$54.2M
n/a
Global RIM is still the core of the business: 71% of revenue and nearly all of the profit. Storage revenue there grew 5.4% organically. Per the 10-Q, that growth came from "revenue management", meaning price increases, not from customers sending many more boxes. Total storage volume was 747.9 million cubic feet, up 1.6% from a year ago, but part of that increase came from 7.4 million cubic feet added through an acquisition in Q3 2025. Service revenue grew 9.1% organically, which the 10-Q attributes to Global Digital Solutions (scanning and digital records work) and higher traditional service activity. The segment margin fell 1.0 point, which the filing puts down to "changes in revenue mix, partially offset by favorable overhead management". In practice that means more low-margin service work relative to high-margin storage.
Global Data Center grew fastest of the three segments and was the only one where margins widened. Revenue rose 38.8%, driven by the 10-Q's "leases that commenced during the first six months of 2026 and in prior periods, improved pricing and increased customer usage of power". Renewal pricing was +12% on a cash basis, per the earnings presentation. Leasable capacity reached 528.5 megawatts (MW), up from 450.2 MW, and 97.1% of it was leased. New leasing was modest in the quarter at 13.1 MW, and churn (capacity customers gave up) rose to 2.0% from 0.5%. The bigger news came after quarter-end: the company signed 75 MW of new leases in July, bringing 2026 leasing to 110 MW through July. The earnings presentation says this includes 51 MW in Mumbai and 25 MW in London with major hyperscalers (the largest cloud companies).
ALM sits inside Corporate & Other and isn't broken out in the financial statements. Per the earnings presentation, ALM revenue grew 88% (82% organic), with the enterprise channel up more than 60% and data center decommissioning (removing and reselling servers from data centers) up more than 100%. The 10-Q adds that growth came from new and existing customers and "improved component pricing trends", meaning higher resale prices for used hardware parts. This is also why consolidated margins fell. "Product cost of sales and other", the line that captures the cost of hardware handled in ALM, more than doubled to $250.9 million from $123.0 million. It rose from 7.2% to 12.4% of total revenue. ALM is now profitable enough that Corporate & Other's EBITDA loss narrowed by $23.1 million, but each extra dollar of ALM revenue still earns less than a dollar of storage rent.
Takeaway: Iron Mountain's growth has shifted to two engines that behave very differently. Data centers are growing about 39% with widening margins. ALM is growing about 88%, but much of that revenue passes through as the cost of the hardware it handles. The core records business is growing mostly through price increases on a nearly flat box count. That mix explains why revenue rose 18.5% while adjusted EBITDA margin slipped 0.9 points, and the dip reflects which business is growing fastest, not a sign that the core is weakening.
Cash flow, spending and debt
Operating cash flow for the first half was $887.8 million, up from $572.4 million. The 10-Q attributes this mainly to higher earnings excluding non-cash charges.
Capital spending was $1,118.1 million in the half (accrual basis), of which $880.1 million went to building data centers. The company expects about $2.2 billion of capital spending for 2026: about $2.05 billion for growth and about $150 million to maintain existing assets.
Debt totalled $17.48 billion at June 30. In June the company issued $1.5 billion of 6¼% notes due 2035 and used the money mainly to repay its revolving credit line. Leverage, measured as net debt including lease obligations divided by a year of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, amortization and rent, was 4.8x. That's down from 5.0x a year earlier and inside management's 4.5x–5.5x target range. The credit agreement allows up to 7.0x.
Dividend: the board declared $0.864 per share for Q3, payable October 2, 2026. Over the trailing twelve months the company paid out 60.0% of AFFO as dividends, down from 62.7% a year ago, which leaves more cash for growth spending.
Guidance and outlook
Management raised full-year 2026 guidance on every line:
Full-year 2026
New guidance
Previous guidance
Approx. YoY at midpoint
Revenue
$7,940–$8,010M
$7,825–$7,925M
~16%
Adjusted EBITDA
$2,945–$2,975M
$2,925–$2,965M
~15%
AFFO
$1,760–$1,780M
$1,735–$1,755M
~15%
AFFO per share
$5.87–$5.93
$5.79–$5.86
~14%
For Q3 2026 the company guided to about $1,980 million of revenue (~13% growth), about $745 million of adjusted EBITDA (~13%) and about $1.47 of AFFO per share (~11%). That's a noticeable slowdown from Q2's 16% AFFO-per-share growth. The earnings presentation also notes that the stronger US dollar since the prior guidance reduced the reported figures, so at the old exchange rates the upgrade would have been larger.
Our read: the revenue guidance increase ($100 million at the midpoint) is much larger than the EBITDA increase ($15 million at the midpoint). That suggests management expects more of the same mix shift toward lower-margin ALM revenue, not a margin recovery. Future profit growth depends mainly on data centers: management says its signed-but-not-yet-started leases support 25%+ data center growth in 2026 and an additional $370 million of revenue beyond 2026 as of June 30, before counting the 75 MW signed in July. The risks to watch are the rising interest bill as roughly $2 billion a year of construction is financed, and whether ALM's component-pricing tailwind holds. Used-hardware prices can reverse quickly.