The five largest technology companies on earth spent more than $400 billion on capital expenditure in 2025, most of it toward AI.
Chips, data centers, servers, and software pipelines absorbed capital at a pace the technology industry had never seen
The constraint holding the whole machine back has almost nothing to do with any of those things. According to the International Energy Agency, global data center electricity consumption is on track to roughly double by 2030, reaching levels equivalent to Japan’s entire annual power demand today. In the United States, data centers are projected to account for nearly half of all electricity demand growth through the end of the decade.
That shift is creating a secondary investment cycle in energy infrastructure that is reshaping which companies and regions matter most to AI’s next phase. Electricity is becoming as strategic as semiconductors. Training and deploying frontier AI models burns through electricity at a scale that was barely imaginable a decade ago.