The level of investment pouring into new infrastructure from datacenter operators is comparable to the turnover of some mid-sized economies.
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According to figures from researchers at Omdia, the annual datacenter capex of cloud giant Amazon alone now exceeds $100 billion, making it roughly comparable to the entire GDP of Costa Rica, and greater than that of Luxembourg or Lithuania.
For the other major cloud players, Google comes in with a capex spend of $82 billion, making it larger than Slovenia’s economy, while Microsoft manages $75 billion, more than the GDP of Uganda. Meta’s $69 billion means it is spending more than the output of Bahrain.
Omdia estimates that global datacenter capex will top $657 billion for the whole of 2025, which means the splurge has almost doubled since 2023 when the total was $330 billion.
These staggering stats are in large part due to companies’ continuing desire for ever more compute power to drive AI development, in the expectation it will one day pay off.
This is despite a report from consultants McKinsey & Company earlier this year that many corporate executives are skeptical about whether the large sums being spent on AI infrastructure today will actually produce any measurable return on investment in the near future.
And Meta disclosed as part of its Q2 earnings that the conventional machine learning models powering its recommender systems are driving profits, not the company’s generative AI projects.
Yet in a fine example of selling shovels during a gold rush, bit barn operators are happy to oblige clients who keep asking for more AI-capable infrastructure.
In its latest Cloud and Data Center Market Snapshot, Omdia says that, for the near term at least, orders for AI compute resources continues to outstrip supply. The development of newer and larger models, such as the recently introduced GPT-5, is driving training demand.
At the same time, broader AI adoption is driving inferencing. Omdia claims that much of the population in developed economies is using AI in some capacity, with ChatGPT users alone topping 700 million, with more than 120 million daily visits.
Drilling down into that bit barn investment, Omdia says that IT kit will continue to be the largest item on the datacenter cost sheet over the next several years. Even so, spending on physical infrastructure will grow faster, driven by the need for new solutions in power generation, distribution, and thermal management to cope with all those hot and hungry AI servers.
Compute density in data hall racks is growing exponentially, calling for “significant and continuous innovation” in cooling and power delivery, while the energy required for all that IT infrastructure is likely to see operators invest in on-site power generation equipment and microgrid-as-a-service. The latter is where a service company provides on-site electricity generation for the bit barn operator.
Looking ahead, Omdia says the ace of datacenter buildout is accelerating, and the capacity of the largest sites is expanding, with multi-gigawatt facilities – equivalent to the entire current capacity of a country like Canada – putting in an appearance.
These are already in the pipeline. Meta has signaled several multi-gigawatt campuses scheduled to come online from 2026, while a recent Deloitte Insights report claims some sites now in the early planning stages could top 5 GW. ®