Many giant data center projects advance, despite risks

Proposals for new giant data centers* — those data centers exceeding 100 MW in power demand — have reached new extremes in scale, compute, investment and power consumption. The scale and concentration of these planned investments (primarily for AI compute and infrastructure) have helped fuel stock markets and even entire economies, but they have also introduced structural challenges for the sector and risks to the global economy.

The huge wave of giant data center proposals that began in 2021 is intended to provide the necessary digital infrastructure for training and running AI models at scale. New Uptime Intelligence research suggests, however, that while many of these proposals have progressed at speed, driven forward by experienced developers, tenants and well-resourced investors, a similar number of projects have progressed little, or even stalled, since they were announced.