[ad_1]
\n<\/p>\n
Massive infrastructure buildouts fueled by tens of billions of hyperscaler dollars are the new norm in cloud as providers race to expand AI capacity.<\/p>\n
The building boom drove up data center spending by 43% year over year to $158 billion in Q2, according to Dell\u2019Oro Group market research<\/a>\u00a0published Tuesday. Microsoft alone invested $24.2 billion in capital e<\/a>xpenditures<\/a>\u00a0during the quarter,\u00a0mostly to grow its Azure cloud empire. The company pledged to spend $30 billion on CapEx during the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, which closes at the end of September.<\/p>\n As data privacy concerns,\u00a0cloud sovereignty requirements<\/a>\u00a0and regulatory actions<\/a>\u00a0tied to generative AI deployments mount, the U.K.\u00a0has become a nexus for infrastructure expansions. Last year, Amazon put 8 billion pounds ($10.4 billion) into plans to expand AWS capacity in the region<\/a>\u00a0through 2028, after spending 3 billion pounds ($3.9 billion) to bolster its cloud presence in the region between 2020 and 2023.<\/p>\n Oracle intends to invest $5 billion in its U.K. cloud<\/a>\u00a0over the next five years as part of a global infrastructure expansion, the company said in March.<\/p>\n Microsoft\u2019s Tuesday announcement adds to a $3.2 billion 2023 commitment to build out cloud facilities in London, Wales<\/a>\u00a0and potentially Northern England over a three-year period, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a recorded message accompanying the release. Google Cloud opened a new facility Tuesday in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, a project that\u2019s part of a 5 billion pound ($6.8 billion) investment<\/a>\u00a0in infrastructure, research, development and related engineering over the next two years.<\/p>\n The hyperscaler spending spree is tied to rising enterprise demand for cloud and AI, which is expected to increase end-user spending on infrastructure, platform and software services globally by 21.5% to $723 billion this year<\/a>, according to Gartner. The analyst firm anticipates a bigger spike in AI spend, which will grow 50% year over year to nearly $1.5 trillion in 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n The investment wave shows no signs of abatement.<\/p>\n Microsoft will announce further capital expenditures for U.S. data centers later this week, Nadella said Tuesday. The company partnered with Nscale and energy company Aker to fund a five-year, $6.2 billion AI infrastructure development initiative<\/a>\u00a0in Norway Wednesday.<\/p>\n Nvidia, which saw its revenues grow nearly eightfold in three years<\/a>, is working with Nscale to deploy more than 300,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs across facilities in the U.S., U.K., Portugal and Norway, the company said Tuesday.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n