Data‑centre construction boom
A market note projects global data‑centre construction will reach about $410.8 billion by 2033, driven largely by hyperscale builders and retrofits. The report highlights rising spend not just on new builds but on preventive maintenance, energy retrofits and liquid‑cooling upgrades. The research underscores growing commercial demand beyond chip procurement into the physical infrastructure layer. (openpr.com)
Data centers are becoming a construction story, not just a chip story: one market note says global buildouts could reach $410.8 billion by 2033. (openpr.com) The note, published in April 2026, says hyperscale operators are driving the market and that spending is shifting toward both new campuses and retrofits of older facilities. It flags preventive maintenance, energy-efficiency upgrades and liquid-cooling installations as growing line items alongside concrete and steel. (openpr.com) A data center is a warehouse for servers, plus the electrical gear, cooling systems and backup equipment that keep those servers running. The International Energy Agency says those facilities sit at the center of artificial-intelligence computing and are becoming a fast-growing source of electricity demand. (iea.org) That is pushing money into the physical plant. Uptime Institute said in its 2025 global survey that operators are facing rising costs, worsening power constraints and pressure to modernize sites for higher-density artificial-intelligence workloads. (uptimeinstitute.com) The biggest cloud companies have already been signaling the scale of the buildout. Microsoft said in January 2025 it planned to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on artificial-intelligence-enabled data centers, while Dell’Oro Group said worldwide data-center capital spending was on track to rise more than 30% in 2025. (marketscreener.com) (delloro.com) Alphabet has described the same shift in its own spending mix. On its 2025 third-quarter earnings call, the company said roughly 40% of its capital expenditures were going to data-center and networking equipment, with the rest largely in servers. (abc.xyz) Cooling is a big reason retrofits are getting attention. AWS says newer artificial-intelligence data centers require changes in power, cooling and hardware design, and market researchers now project the separate liquid-cooling segment to expand sharply through 2033 as rack power rises. (aws.amazon.com) (grandviewresearch.com) The energy side is tightening at the same time. The International Energy Agency said in April 2025 that artificial intelligence is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centers, adding to pressure on grids and making efficiency upgrades part of expansion plans, not an optional add-on. (iea.org) That helps explain why the current boom reaches beyond land deals and shell buildings. The next phase of data-center spending is increasingly about substations, chillers, pipes, pumps and retrofits that let existing sites carry hotter, denser computing loads. (openpr.com) (uptimeinstitute.com)
