Global investment tied to data centers is set to accelerate sharply, with at least $3 trillion expected to be deployed over the next five years, according to a report released Monday by Moody’s Ratings.
The ratings agency said the scale of spending will underpin continued growth in artificial intelligence and cloud computing, with capital flowing into servers, computing equipment, data center facilities and the expansion of power generation and grid capacity needed to support them.
Large technology groups are expected to dominate this investment cycle as demand for data center capacity and electricity rises. Six U.S. hyperscalers — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL), Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) and CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) — are forecast to invest around $500 billion in data centers in this year alone as capacity continues to scale.
While banks are expected to retain a “prominent role” in financing the expansion, Moody’s noted that the sheer size of capital requirements will increasingly draw in other institutional investors alongside traditional lenders.
The report also anticipates a broader use of capital markets by U.S. data center operators, including asset-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities and private credit, particularly for refinancing purposes. New financings are expected to grow in both size and concentration following record issuance levels in 2025.
In the U.S. asset-backed securities market specifically, issuance reached roughly $15 billion in 2025, with Moody’s expecting volumes to “grow considerably” this year, partly driven by loans linked to data center construction.
Despite the rapid pace of investment, Moody’s said the expansion of data center capacity is still in its “early stages,” with strong global growth expected to continue over the next 12 to 18 months.
John Medina, senior vice president at Moody’s, said the additional capacity “will be needed at some point in the next 10 years or so,” while acknowledging that the speed of adoption remains difficult to predict as new technologies emerge. “A ChatGPT that didn’t exist three years ago now uses a lot of compute,” Medina noted.