The AI Data Center Buildout
Big-Four Hyperscaler Capex
Cash capital spending by Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta, the demand signal every other layer of this sector trades on. Combined spend roughly doubled between 2023 and 2025 to about $376B, and that excludes finance leases, so the true figure is higher still.
NVIDIA Data Center Revenue
The cleanest public confirmation that committed capex is converting into deployed AI infrastructure. Gear orders, construction, and power demand all follow this line with a lag of quarters.
North America Under Construction
Primary-market capacity under construction reached 6,350 MW at year-end 2024 and eased to 5,994 MW at year-end 2025, the first decline since 2020, as permitting and power delivery stretched timelines, then hit a record 7,481 MW in H1 2026. Most of the pipeline remains preleased.
AI Megaprojects
The flagship campuses, from Stargate to Colossus. Claimed gigawatts and dollar figures are sponsor statements that mix ambition with contracted spend; the status column is the part to watch.
| Project | Sponsors | Claimed scale |
|---|---|---|
| Stargate | SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX (initial equity funders); Crusoe builds Abilene | Up to $500B over four years; ~10 GW ambition; Abilene planned at ~1.2 GW |
| Hyperion | Meta | Up to 5 GW; more than $50B (expanded July 2026) |
| Prometheus | Meta | ~1 GW cluster |
| Colossus | xAI (part of SpaceX since Feb 2, 2026) | About 100,000 GPUs (Oct 2024); a 200,000 GPU cluster (Feb 2025); over 1M H100 GPU equivalents across Colossus I and II (end-2025) |
| Fairwater | Microsoft | Described by Microsoft as its most powerful AI datacenter; multi-site program |
| Project Rainier | Amazon (for Anthropic) | ~2.2 GW campus ambition; Anthropic uses over 1M Trainium2 chips (Apr 2026) |
Neocloud Scorecard
The AI-specialized GPU clouds that anchor much of the new leased capacity. Their contract backlogs are enormous relative to revenue, which is either the sector's growth runway or its credit risk, depending on how AI demand develops.
| Company | Revenue | Contracted backlog |
|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave (CRWV) | $1.9B (2024) to $5.1B (2025); $2.6B in Q2 2026 | Revenue backlog of about $104B at June 30, 2026, excluding more than $25B of net new commitments added in early Q3 |
| Nebius (NBIS) | $0.5B (2025); $0.6B in Q2 2026, up 454 percent year over year | About $40B of customer commitments (company-stated, not an audited RPO), including investment-grade contracts such as Microsoft and Meta |
| Crusoe (private) | Private; not disclosed | Over $140B in total contracted value and 6 GW+ of gross contracted capacity (company-stated, Sep 2026) |
| Lambda (private) | Private; not disclosed | Multi-billion dollar Microsoft agreement announced in 2025 |