2025 datacentre capex up 57%

“The Top 4 US cloud service providers—Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—increased data center capex by 76 percent in 2025. Oracle more than tripled its data center capex as it builds capacity for the Stargate project,” says Dell’Oro’s Baron Fung.

“This growth was supported by AI infrastructure build-outs and additional investments in general-purpose servers and storage to support both AI and cloud workloads.We forecast full-year 2026 data center capex to surpass $1 trillion. The trillion-dollar threshold marks a major milestone, supported by well over 10 M high-end accelerators as the primary capex driver, along with related infrastructure.

Most AI-related investments support the hyperscalers’ internal frontier models, though there have been increasing investments to support AI model developers’ ambitions.

While a significant portion of AI investments supports training workloads, inferencing will likely become a larger capex driver going forward, especially as token-hungry reasoning models become more widespread.

This heightened level of investment raises the potential for overcapacity in AI infrastructure, although hyperscalers are taking proactive measures to mitigate risks and optimize costs,” explained Fung.

The global data center capex growth outlook to increase by more than 50 percent in 2026.

Dell’Oro projects general-purpose server average selling prices to increase by high double digits in 2026, with escalating DRAM and storage prices as the primary growth driver.

Dell led all OEMs in AI-optimized server revenue in 2025, followed by Supermicro, driven by strong NVIDIA Blackwell shipments.

White-box vendors captured the majority of server shipments, supported by hyperscale AI deployments for Blackwell and custom systems, as well as a surge in general-purpose server demand for compute and storage workloads.

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