Iron Mountain’s first-quarter results look exceptional on the surface, and in many respects they are. But a closer reading of the numbers reveals a growth story that is partly dependent on conditions that have already begun to shift, making this a quarter that raises as many questions about durability as it answers about momentum.
In the first quarter of 2026, Iron Mountain reported revenue of $1.94 billion, up 21.6% year over year, with organic revenue growth of 17.2%, its highest organic rate in more than a quarter century. Adjusted EBITDA rose 22.1% to $708 million, and adjusted funds from operations climbed 22% to $426 million. Growth was concentrated in what the company calls its “growth businesses” — data centers, digital solutions and Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) — which collectively expanded more than 50% year over year and now account for more than 30% of total revenue.
Within that portfolio, ALM provided the clearest signal for the IT asset disposition sector. Segment revenue reached $232 million in the quarter, an increase of 92% compared with the prior year, including 77% organic growth. Management reported that ALM delivered greater than 100% organic growth in data center decommissioning and more than 45% organic growth in the enterprise channel. On the back of that performance, the company raised its full-year 2026 ALM revenue outlook to $950 million, up $100 million from the prior guide, noting that $40 million of that uplift had already been realized in the first quarter.
The earnings call detailed several large ALM mandates. CEO Bill Meaney cited a new multi-year agreement with a global advertising company that consolidated a fragmented vendor base and named Iron Mountain as sole ALM provider in more than 30 countries, with responsibility for decommissioning and remarketing enterprise IT assets. The company also described a project to recycle and reuse 75,000 IT hardware items across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific for an existing data center customer, as well as a multi-year contract to securely decommission, sanitize and remarket 60,000 drives for a global technology firm. At this stage, ALM growth is still being driven by a relatively small number of landmark contracts rather than a deep, diversified base.
Parallel growth in the data center business is reinforcing that link. In the same quarter, Iron Mountain’s data center revenue rose 47% year over year to $255 million, driven by lease commencements, price increases and faster-than-expected power ramp-up from existing customers. The company reported signing 22 megawatts of new leases, commencing 24 megawatts and renewing 7 megawatts in Q1. It highlighted the full lease-up of its 16-megawatt Miami site under a 10-year contract with a current ALM decommissioning customer and the lease of 10 megawatts in Amsterdam to a new global cloud provider.
Management reiterated a target of at least 100 megawatts of new leasing in 2026 and told analysts it expects to exceed that figure based on ongoing negotiations. Power is a pass-through item that inflates the data center top line without proportionally improving margins — data center EBITDA margin was down 30 basis points year over year on a reported basis, and up 120 basis points once pass-through power is removed.
Component markets are another important factor in the ALM results — and an area that warrants particular scrutiny going forward. CFO Barry Hytinen told analysts that memory prices continued to rise relative to last year before moderating in late March and early April, then stabilizing at levels meaningfully above 2025 and in line with the company’s guidance assumptions. He said the combination of higher component prices and increased decommissioning and enterprise volumes contributed to ALM’s revenue beat and improved margins. A portion of ALM’s headline 92% growth was driven by a pricing tailwind that Hytinen himself flagged as having already peaked. The underlying organic volume growth is real, but the rate will be harder to sustain once the year-over-year pricing comparison normalizes.
The company is also using its existing footprint to expand lifecycle services. Meaney said Iron Mountain is building ALM capacity across the 61 countries where it operates, and that this global reach is now a differentiator in competitive tenders. Hytinen described the enterprise ALM business as very under-penetrated and reported that the company added around two dozen Fortune 1000 customers to ALM in the quarter, often beginning with a single region or asset flow and then expanding scope.
These early-stage, single-region engagements are an encouraging leading indicator of future breadth, but whether ALM becomes a truly recurring, diversified revenue stream rather than remaining a project-heavy business is still an open question. He characterized the enterprise ALM pipeline as a long-term growth opportunity, reinforced by cross-selling into the company’s records management base.
On M&A, Iron Mountain signaled that it intends to continue consolidating the ITAD space. Management described the ALM total addressable market as large and highly fragmented and said the company is actively evaluating additional tuck-in acquisitions. Hytinen reported that ALM acquisitions such as Premier Surplus and ACT Logistics contributed $17 million of revenue in the quarter and said typical purchase multiples are in the mid- to high-single-digit range on a pre-synergy EBITDA basis, with realized multiples falling to below five times EBITDA after integration.
The strong quarter led to upgrades across the 2026 outlook. Iron Mountain now projects full-year revenue of $7.825 billion to $7.925 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $2.925 billion to $2.965 billion and AFFO of $1.735 billion to $1.755 billion, implying year-over-year growth of roughly 14% at the midpoint for both revenue and EBITDA. Management said about $100 million of the revenue increase is attributable to ALM, with the remainder split among records management, digital solutions and data centers, and noted that the forecast uses the same foreign-exchange assumptions as previous guidance. The guidance raise is substantial and explicitly not FX-driven — a meaningful signal of underlying confidence. It also sets a higher bar at a moment when some of the conditions that powered Q1 have already begun to moderate.
Alongside these positive indicators, the call and supporting materials point to several areas of risk and uncertainty that deserve careful attention from ITAD professionals.
The most immediate concern is the ALM growth rate itself. The 92% headline figure is partly acquisition-inflated — strip out Premier Surplus and ACT Logistics and the organic rate was 77%, still exceptional but a different number. A meaningful share of that organic outperformance was driven by the memory pricing tailwind that peaked mid-quarter. Management has guided for continued volume growth in H2, but the year-over-year pricing comparison will become progressively less favorable as 2026 advances. What the underlying run-rate looks like once component prices fully normalize is the central question the next few quarters will answer.
A related concern is the reliance on a handful of large, project-oriented mandates. The wins Meaney highlighted — a sole-provider contract for a global advertising conglomerate, a 75,000-unit hardware reuse project, a 60,000-drive sanitization deal — are real and significant, but they also show that ALM revenue at this stage remains concentrated in a small number of landmark engagements. The addition of around two dozen Fortune 1000 clients in the quarter is the more important long-term signal, but those relationships are still in early, limited-scope phases. Until that base broadens and deepens materially, ALM carries more revenue lumpiness than the growth rate alone implies.
Execution and compliance demands at scale present another area to watch. As ALM expands across dozens of countries, including complex public-sector contracts and cross-border flows of data-bearing equipment, the operational and regulatory stakes rise. Transportation logistics, chain of custody, data sanitization and recycling are the most risk-intensive components of IT asset disposition, and any failure in data destruction, export compliance or downstream recycling could carry reputational and legal consequences that go beyond a single contract.
The growth outlook also embeds rising expectations at a demanding valuation. Analysts who follow the stock project that ALM could account for roughly 17% of Iron Mountain’s revenue by 2030, up from a single-digit share today, and the stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio above 200. Coverage notes that the company has experienced multiple compression at points due to shifting sentiment around AI-linked names, despite consistently raising guidance. In that context, the upgraded 2026 targets assume that double-digit growth in ALM, data centers and digital can be sustained through component cycles, capex shifts and integration of further acquisitions — a high bar that Q1’s tailwind-assisted performance does not by itself guarantee.
For the ITAD sector, Iron Mountain’s first quarter provides a clear view of what a scaled, integrated lifecycle business can look like inside a public company when market conditions align. The 17.2% organic growth rate is the real standout, at Iron Mountain’s scale and maturity, that kind of organic momentum is unusual and reflects genuine commercial traction. The cross-sell flywheel between records management, data centers and ALM is working.
The results also expose the sensitivities built into this model: exposure to component pricing, dependence on a narrow set of large customers, the operational burden of global compliance, and the pressure to maintain elevated growth rates now embedded in both guidance and investor expectations. The quarter validates the thesis. Whether the next few quarters can sustain it is the more important question.
