Data-Center Buildout Goes Big: AI’s growth spurred infrastructure investment worldwide

Top AI companies announced plans to build data centers that are projected to burn through trillions of dollars and gigawatts of electricity in the next few years.

What happened: The AI industry’s capital spending topped $300 billion this year alone, much of it allocated to building new data centers to process AI. This was a preliminary budget, as companies mapped out ambitious plans to construct facilities the size of small towns with the energy needs of medium-size cities. The race to build enough processing power to satisfy hoped-for demand for inference and training could cost $5.2 trillion by 2030, the consultancy McKinsey & Company projected.

Driving the story: Top AI companies announced a cascade of data-center projects across the world. Each gigawatt of data-center capacity will cost roughly $50 billion to build.

• In January, OpenAI launched Stargate, a $500 billion project in partnership with Oracle, SoftBank, and the Emirati investment firm MGX. Ultimately the company announced plans to build 20 gigawatts of data-center capacity worldwide and forecast demand up to 5 times that amount. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he hopes eventually to add 1 gigawatt of capacity per week.
• Meta spent around $72 billion on infrastructure projects in 2025, primarily in the U.S., a figure executives said would rise considerably in 2026. The company’s Hyperion project includes a $27 billion, 5-gigawatt data center in rural Louisiana. The project’s funding deal will keep the assets and debt off Meta’s books.
• Microsoft spent $80 billion on data center projects worldwide in 2025, including facilities in Wisconsin and Atlanta that will be connected by a dedicated fiber-optic network to operate as a massive supercomputer. To supply electricity, the company signed a 20-year deal to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania, which will supply 835 megawatts starting in 2028. The company also pledged to expand its European cloud and AI capacity to 200 data centers across Europe.
• Amazon expected to spend $125 billion on infrastructure in 2025 and more in 2026. Its $11 billion Project Rainier is a 2.2 gigawatt data center in Indiana that runs on 500,000 Amazon Trainium 2 chips. In addition, Amazon planned to spend roughly $14 billion to expand data centers in Australia, and about $21 billion in Germany between 2025 and 2029.
• Alphabet expected to spend up to $93 billion on infrastructure in 2025, up from a forecast of $75 billion. The company announced a $40 billion project to add 3 data centers in Texas through 2027. It also committed $15 billion to a project in India, announced roughly $6 billion in investments in Germany, and rolled out new or expanded projects in Australia, Malaysia, and Uruguay.

Yes, but: Can the U.S. economy and infrastructure support such immense investments? There are reasons to wonder.

• The expense of the data-center buildout will require an estimated $2 trillion in annual AI revenue by 2030, according to consultants at Bain & Co. That would be more than the combined 2024 earnings of  Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia.
• The current electric grid may be insufficient to power these data centers. Two facilities in Silicon Valley are sitting idle because local utilities don’t have the capacity to connect them to the grid, according to Bloomberg.
• In mid-December, Blue Owl Capital, which had been in talks to help finance a $10 billion data center for Oracle and OpenAI, pulled out of the deal, Financial Times reported. The report cited concerns about Oracle’s growing debt amid the data-center buildout. Blue Owl continues to finance other Oracle-OpenAI data-center projects.

Where things stand: Despite concerns about an AI bubble, the boom in building infrastructure is generating real jobs and sales in an otherwise tepid economy. Investment in data centers and AI accounted for nearly all the growth of the U.S. gross domestic product in the first half of 2025, according to Harvard economist Jason Furman. At this stage, there is evidence to back the idea that 2025 lifted the curtain on a new industrial age.