Worldwide data center capital expenditures increased 59 percent year-over-year, marking the eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth as the AI investment cycle continues to broaden beyond early, training-focused deployments, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group.
“The Top 4 US cloud service providers—Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—continue to raise data center capex expectations for 2025, supported by increased investments in both AI and general-purpose infrastructure. Oracle is also on track to double its data center capex this year as it expands capacity for the Stargate project,” said Baron Fung, Senior Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “What is notable this cycle is not just the pace of spending, but the expanding scope of investment, as cloud providers simultaneously scale accelerated compute, general-purpose servers, and the supporting infrastructure required to deploy AI at production scale. Accelerated server spending surged in the quarter, driven by the ramp of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra, along with custom accelerator platforms across US hyperscalers, neo cloud providers, and sovereign AI deployments. At the same time, cloud service providers are increasing emphasis on greater capex discipline by optimizing asset depreciation and lifecycles to ensure healthy cash flow,” explained Fung.
Additional highlights from the 3Q 2025 Data Center IT Capex Quarterly Report:
- The global data center capex growth outlook was raised through 2026, reflecting sustained hyperscale investment and continued prioritization of AI infrastructure.
- Demand for general-purpose servers strengthened as cloud providers expanded compute and storage capacity to support growing cloud services and inference-heavy AI workloads.
- Dell led all server OEMs in revenue, followed by HPE and Lenovo, gaining share on strong NVIDIA Blackwell shipments and a refreshed x86 portfolio, while white-box vendors captured the majority of server shipments, supported by hyperscale AI deployments and elevated general-purpose server demand.