SalesGlobe Signals is about seeing a bigger, macro view on growth and taking actions that will help you reach your growth aspirations. This month let’s look at signals around the data center surge, specifically, how this extraordinary build of digital infrastructure is reshaping energy grids, communities, capital markets, and the competitive landscape for companies across virtually every industry.

In Signals, our focus is on helping executives answer two questions for their businesses:

1. What Are the Market Signals? Indicators you might watch for your business that may signal what’s ahead.
2. What Does This Mean for Profitable Revenue Growth? Based on the signals, how you may think about growth and the actions you may consider.

The AI infrastructure build is an economic force reshaping energy grids, labor markets, real estate, water systems, and capital flows at a scale not seen since the interstate highway system.

What Are the Market Signals?

In October 2025, SalesGlobe Signals examined the AI Infrastructure Build as it was gathering momentum. Since then, the pace has accelerated beyond even optimistic projections. Global data center capital spending surged 57% in 2025 and is on track to cross $1 trillion in 2026. The hyperscalers, which include Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, are committing over $100 billion each. The ripple effects of this build are now visible in electricity rates, water tables, zoning fights, labor markets, and even the night sky.

Behind this surge is a simple dynamic: AI workloads require orders of magnitude more compute than conventional cloud applications, and every GPU cluster requires power, cooling, space, and connectivity that doesn’t yet exist at the required scale. The race to build it is on and it is touching every industry in its path.

Signal 1. The Spending Has Crossed into Historic Territory — $1 Trillion in 2026.

In October 2025, global data center capital spending was estimated at $600 billion for the year. That number has since been revised sharply upward. Worldwide data center capex surged 57% in 2025 and full-year 2026 spending is projected to surpass $1 trillion, according to Dell’Oro Group. This marks a milestone in the history of infrastructure investment.

The hyperscalers increased their combined data center capex by 76% in 2025, and their 2026 commitments from recent earnings calls are staggering. Amazon is targeting $200 billion in capex for 2026, up from $125 billion in 2025. Google is guiding $175 to $185 billion. Meta will spend $115 to $135 billion. Microsoft is on track for $110 to $120 billion. Oracle, building capacity for the Stargate project, has more than tripled its data center capex. Together, the Big Five are committing $660 to $690 billion, 62% more than their record 2025 spending.

Goldman Sachs estimates that total hyperscaler capex from 2025 through 2027 will reach $1.15 trillion, more than double what was spent in the prior three-year period. These are not discretionary investments. The hyperscalers report that their markets are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. Every facility they can bring online is already spoken for.

What Does This Mean for Profitable Revenue Growth? For companies in construction, engineering, commercial real estate, and infrastructure services, this spending creates a multi-year demand wave that is largely pre-committed. Data center construction starts in the U.S. reached $77.7 billion in 2025, up nearly 190% year-over-year, with average project values exceeding $633 million. The pipeline of announced and under-construction projects running into the late 2020s means that companies capable of delivering at hyperscaler speed and scale have essentially locked-in revenue streams.

For financial services firms like private equity, infrastructure funds, REITs, and project finance banks, the trillion-dollar capex figure represents a capital mobilization challenge as much as an opportunity. Hyperscalers raised $108 billion in debt during 2025 to fund buildouts beyond their cash flows, with projections of $1.5 trillion in debt issuance over the coming years. Firms that can structure, underwrite, or advise on this financing have a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Data center investment now looks more like an infrastructure play with long-term contracts that lock in revenue, physical assets that serve as collateral, and risk profiles that look more like a utility than a software company.

For technology companies serving enterprise and mid-market clients, the trillion-dollar capex story has a second-order effect: it is pulling investment-grade demand for AI compute down-market to smaller companies. As hyperscalers race to build and fill capacity, the cost of running AI (e.g., processing a query, analyzing a document, generating a response) is falling, and that declining cost is making AI adoption economically viable for organizations far below the Fortune 500.

Signal 2. The Hyperscalers Control the Flow and the Power.

In October 2025, we noted that hyperscalers controlled over 98% of the non-utility power procurement market in the U.S., a figure that underscored their dominance not just in computing but in the energy sector itself. That dynamic has only intensified. Data centers now consume approximately 6% of all electricity in the United States, according to the International Data Center Authority. They accounted for 50% of all new U.S. electricity demand growth in 2025 which is more than all residential, industrial, and transportation sectors combined.

By 2030, U.S. data center electricity usage is projected to rise from today’s 6% to nearly 8% of national consumption. Globally, Gartner estimates that data center electricity demand will double from 448 terawatt hours in 2025 to 980 terawatt hours by 2030, with AI-optimized servers driving the bulk of the increase. In some states the concentration is even more pronounced. In Virginia, data centers consume more than 25% of kilowatt-hours of the state’s total electricity supply.

Water is the second critical resource. North American data centers consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025, primarily for cooling high-density AI server racks. A large-scale AI data center can consume as much as 5 million gallons of water per day which is equivalent to the residential demand of approximately 50,000 people. In water-stressed geographies like Arizona, Texas, and the Colorado River Basin, this is becoming a hard constraint on where data centers can be built, regardless of available power.

What Does This Mean for Profitable Revenue Growth? For energy companies, utilities, and renewable power developers, this is the defining demand signal of the decade. The hyperscalers are moving beyond traditional utility relationships by directly contracting with renewable energy producers, funding their own generation capacity, and in some markets operating essentially as their own utilities. Companies that can offer guaranteed power delivery, storage, and redundancy at scale will have significant pricing power.

For water technology and management companies (e.g., treatment systems, cooling efficiency, closed-loop cooling, water recycling) the data center boom is creating an entirely new category of demand. Liquid cooling and immersion cooling technologies that dramatically reduce water consumption are attracting significant investment. Companies with differentiated approaches to thermal management, water reuse, or efficiency monitoring are moving from niche to essential.

Internationally, the power dynamic plays out differently by region. In EMEA, where renewable energy grids are more mature, data center operators are combining solar and wind with private wire transmission to reduce power costs by up to 40% versus grid electricity. In APAC, governments in markets like India, Malaysia, and Japan are using data center investment as a catalyst for grid modernization, creating opportunities for energy infrastructure companies willing to co-invest with sovereign digital strategies. In Latin America, Brazil is emerging as the dominant hub, partly because its renewable energy mix and reducing import taxes on GPU chips make it attractive for AI-focused hyperscale investment.

Signal 3. Geography Is Destiny and the Map Is Changing.

Northern Virginia remains the data center capital of the world, with 665 operational facilities in a region sometimes called Data Center Alley. The density of fiber, the reliability of power, and the accumulated ecosystem of providers have made it nearly impossible to replicate in other locations. But the map is changing. Texas has surpassed Virginia in construction activity, with 140 data centers underway as of March 2026, narrowly ahead of Virginia’s 136. Georgia has emerged as a breakout hub with 56 projects under construction and an announced pipeline more than five times its current footprint.

More significantly, the next wave of data center development is moving to non-traditional markets. Power availability, not latency or connectivity, is now the dominant site selection variable. This is pushing development to areas like West Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, where stranded power assets, open land, and lower opposition risk create favorable conditions. Rural America, where 73% of new data center construction is occurring according to Pew Research, is experiencing an infrastructure investment wave unlike anything since the rural electrification program of the 1930s.

Internationally, the Americas dominate global data center capacity at roughly 50% of the world’s total, with the U.S. accounting for 90% of that. But APAC is growing fastest. The region is projected to expand from 32 gigawatts to 57 gigawatts of capacity by 2030, a 12% compound annual rate. Southeast Asia is a standout. Johor, Malaysia has quickly become a 2-gigawatt market; India is positioning to surpass Tokyo. In EMEA, the traditional FLAPD markets (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin) remain the core, but Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are funding aggressive expansion in the UAE and Saudi Arabia as part of digital sovereignty strategies. Latin America sees $11 billion invested in 2025, with Brazil accounting for nearly 40% of the regional base.

What Does This Mean for Profitable Revenue Growth? The geographic shift in data center development creates a clear playbook for regional economic development organizations, utilities, and local businesses. Markets that can offer available power, streamlined permitting, and community-benefit frameworks are winning projects worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. For companies in construction, logistics, facilities management, and local professional services, the question is straightforward: Are you positioned in the markets that are growing, or are you concentrated in saturated coastal hubs where competition is fierce and new projects are harder to approve?

For real estate developers and investors, the rural data center wave creates a new asset class in previously overlooked markets. Industrial land, power access rights, and proximity to transmission infrastructure are now the scarce inputs. Companies and funds that acquired these assets before the data center wave hit are sitting on significant value appreciation. Those entering now should look at emerging markets such as West Texas, the Midwest, and secondary Southeast cities before the same dynamic plays out there.

For companies selling into the supply chain, including construction materials, modular building systems, cooling infrastructure, and network equipment, the geographic diversification means extending sales coverage into markets that were previously too small to prioritize. A data center campus in rural Wyoming needs the same HVAC, electrical switchgear, and fiber as one in Northern Virginia. The geography changes, but the bill of materials and spend does not.

Signal 4. The NIMBY Backlash Is Real and It Is Creating Both Risk and Opportunity.

Data centers have become the new NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) flashpoint. From May 2024 to March 2025, up to $64 billion in U.S. data center projects were delayed or blocked due to local opposition. Project cancellations quadrupled in 2025 compared to the prior year. Communities in at least 14 states have enacted temporary moratoriums on data center development, and more than 300 state-level data center bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026 alone. The backlash is bipartisan and growing.

The concerns driving opposition are real. A large data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 homes. In the PJM (originally Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland) grid region, which now serves 13 states with 65 million people, power supply costs jumped from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion in a single year, with data centers accounting for nearly two-thirds of the increase. Residential electricity rates nationally rose roughly 30% between July 2020 and July 2025. Noise from cooling systems, diesel backup generators, heavy construction traffic, and the visual transformation of farmland and residential areas have fueled grassroots organizing across 28 states.

But the backlash is not uniformly negative for business. A Data Center Watch survey found that 70% of Americans are comfortable with a data center within a few miles of their home when they understand the economic benefits. Communities that have successfully negotiated community-benefit agreements that include requirements such as water-use caps, noise controls, local hiring requirements, and community investment funds, are finding that the data center industry is a willing partner. Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s model agreement secured $20 million in community contributions alongside meaningful environmental controls and became a template that other municipalities are studying.

What Does This Mean for Profitable Revenue Growth? The NIMBY wave is creating an entire ecosystem of services that did not exist three years ago. Environmental consulting firms, community engagement specialists, permitting accelerators, legal practices focused on data center location, and public affairs firms with experience navigating organized opposition are all in high demand. For professional services companies with relevant expertise, this is a greenfield market with a multi-year runway.

For companies that can genuinely address the resource concerns including water-efficient cooling, grid-decoupled power solutions, noise mitigation systems, or carbon-neutral energy sourcing, the opposition movement is paradoxically a major sales driver. Every moratorium and project delay is a procurement opportunity for a technology that solves the problem driving the moratorium. Companies that can credibly claim they reduce a data center’s community footprint are moving from vendor to strategic partner.

For consumer-facing companies, the data center backlash is a window into broader public ambivalence about AI. The communities protesting data centers are often expressing a more diffuse anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs, privacy, and social stability. Companies that serve these communities in retail, media, healthcare, or financial services should be attentive to this sentiment. The companies that build trust with AI-skeptical consumers now, through transparency, human-centered design, and visible accountability, are creating durable competitive advantage as AI becomes ubiquitous.

Signal 5. Data Centers are Moving to Space and Out of Our Back Yards.

Data centers are approaching orbit. Starcloud, which is backed by NVIDIA’s Inception Program, launched the first GPU-enabled satellite in November 2025, carrying an H100-class system more powerful than any previously operated in space. The company became the first to train a large language model in orbit. In January 2026, SpaceX filed plans with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million orbital data center satellites. Axiom Space deployed a data processing unit on the International Space Station in late 2025. Orbital data center nodes successfully reached low-Earth orbit in January 2026.

The benefits are that data centers in orbit have access to unlimited solar power and the natural cooling of space, solving the two most acute terrestrial constraints. The in-orbit data center market, valued at $500 million in 2025, is projected to reach $39 billion by 2035. Within a decade, Starcloud projects that most new data center capacity will launch to space rather than build on Earth. That is almost certainly optimistic — but the direction of travel is not in question. Space-based computing will handle the AI training workloads that Earth observation processing, and sovereign cloud applications that Earth-based facilities are physically constrained to serve.

On Earth, the jobs picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. The data center industry’s total economic contribution to U.S. GDP reached $927 billion in 2024, up 161% from $355 billion in 2017, and the industry supported 5.5 million total jobs, direct and indirect, according to a May 2026 PwC analysis for the Data Center Coalition. Each direct data center job supports more than six jobs elsewhere in the economy, in construction, logistics, security, facilities management, and local services. A typical 800,000 square foot data center supports over 5,000 jobs during construction and approximately 500 permanent jobs once operational. Temporary construction work is abundant and skilled. Permanent operational employment is high wage but limited. In Virginia, data centers created only one direct permanent job per $54 million invested, which is why the jobs argument remains contested in community debates.

What Does This Mean for Profitable Revenue Growth? For aerospace and defense companies, satellite manufacturers, launch service providers, and in-space computing specialists, the orbital data center market is the most significant new infrastructure category in a generation. The economics of space-based AI compute are improving faster than previously assumed. Declining launch costs, maturing small satellite platforms, and the urgency of the terrestrial power constraint are all pulling the timeline forward. Companies that develop capabilities in radiation-hardened compute, in-orbit thermal management, or space-to-ground data relay are building positions in a market that will be very large by the mid-2030s.

For workforce development organizations, community colleges, technical training programs, and construction labor markets, the data center wave is creating sustained demand for electricians, HVAC technicians, network engineers, security specialists, and facilities managers, trades that cannot be offshored and that pay well above median wages. States and municipalities that invest proactively in training programs aligned to data center operational needs are creating durable local employment pipelines that hyperscalers actively value in site selection. This is a specific and actionable lever for regional economic development.

For technology companies building AI applications, whether enterprise software, healthcare AI, autonomous systems, or consumer services, the infrastructure story is ultimately about falling costs and rising capability. Every dollar the hyperscalers invest in data center capacity reduces the cost of AI inference for everyone who builds on top of their platforms. The companies that will benefit most from the data center surge are not necessarily the ones selling picks and shovels. They are the ones building the products and services, with the continuously declining cost of AI inference as compute prices fall. That is where the largest and most durable revenue growth opportunity sits.

Ten Questions About Your Growth Strategy amid the Data Center Surge.

To set your direction, here are ten questions you may ask your organization:

1. Where does our business sit in the data center value chain? Are we a direct supplier to hyperscalers, a provider to the suppliers, or a downstream beneficiary of falling AI compute costs? Each position carries different timing and margin dynamics.
2. Which of our current customers are already investing in or affected by data center expansion? Have we mapped our existing relationships against the supply chain from hyperscalers to construction to energy to operations?
3. What is our geographic exposure to data center growth markets? Are we concentrated in mature, saturated markets, or do we have a presence in the emerging markets (e.g., rural Midwest, Southeast, West Texas, APAC secondary cities) where the next wave is building?
4. If power and water are the binding constraints on data center development, does our business have a product or service that addresses either? If not, is there a partnership or acquisition that would put us in that position?
5. How is the NIMBY backlash affecting our customers or our project pipeline? Are community opposition and permitting delays creating risk for us, or are they creating demand for our services?
6. Is our business positioned to benefit from the falling cost of AI compute that the data center surge is driving? Which of our products or services would become significantly more valuable if AI inference costs fell by 50% over the next three years? Are we pushing to develop new products and services with the increase capability and decreased cost of compute?
7. Do we have a view on the orbital data center market and its implications for our industry? At what point does the space-based computing trajectory become a risk to our terrestrial assumptions (e.g., how we might serve the AI infrastructure build in geographic markets?
8. How are we tracking the data center build internationally? Are the EMEA, APAC, and LATAM dynamics creating export opportunities, partnership opportunities, or competitive threats for our business?
9. What does our workforce strategy look like in markets where data centers are competing aggressively for the same skilled trades (e.g., electricians, HVAC technicians, network engineers) that we rely on? Are data centers creating a talent cost problem for us?
10. What is our three-year scenario if data center spending sustains at $1 trillion annually? Which of our business units or customer segments benefit most and which face the greatest disruption from an AI-enabled competitive landscape?

Data Center Surge Addendum

Your Call to Action

The data center surge is not a technology sector story. It is a macro-economic force that is restructuring energy demand, redirecting capital, reshaping communities, creating labor markets, and redefining the competitive landscape for companies that serve American and global business.

Consider these Signals from two perspectives: How will they affect your customers and their ability to grow? And how will they affect your own business, your customer and client base, your product mix, your distribution model, and your competitive positioning?

Get beyond current state and ask your team where they see the signals projecting ahead and what this means for your organization’s profitable growth. Consider each of the questions I’ve asked, add your own, create a plan, and get into action.

We would enjoy a conversation about what this means for your business and your growth strategy. Reach out at info@salesglobe.com or visit us at SalesGlobe.com.

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SalesGlobe is a revenue growth consulting and services firm focused on helping our clients reach their growth aspirations through better solution development and operationalizing to get results in sales strategy, go-to-market, account strategy, and sales compensation.