Dive Brief:
- Global data center investment will reach at least $3 trillion over the next five years as construction becomes costlier and demand stretches resources, according to a report from Moody’s Ratings, a New York City-based financial services company.
- Hyperscalers will drive double-digit data center capacity growth through at least 2026, which will be a major boon for construction pipelines, the report said, adding that power limitations and construction costs could ultimately slow completion times.
- Despite the costlier builds, financing structures are evolving to support large-scale builds and some tenants are increasingly willing to share certain construction delivery risks to accelerate completion, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
The report highlights why data centers rank among the strongest drivers of U.S. nonresidential construction activity.
In fact, Moody’s said the data center construction boom is still “in its early stages.” Larger hyperscale data centers with capacity levels of more than 300 megawatts will begin coming online this year, exponentially increasing capacity, according to the report.
But while projects are increasing in size, developers are accelerating construction schedules to meet hyperscalers’ push to shorten speed to market.
That’s because more tenants are willing to exempt power and essential utility availability from completion requirements and increase their share of risk in case of unexpected events. These changes to risk-allocation help accelerate construction as many of these new builds may be delivered late, according to Moody’s.
High global demand for skilled labor and essential materials doesn’t help.
Miners of copper and rare earth metals and manufacturers of essential cooling and power related equipment are cautiously ramping up production to meet demand from data centers. But the additional product will likely still be insufficient to moderate price increases in 2026, according to the report.
That means new data centers will cost more than older facilities located in similar markets, Moody’s said. Nonetheless, the report does not forecast lower demand because of those higher price tags.
In northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the world, leases for hyperscale data centers with more than 4 megawatts of capacity increased to a range of $130 to $190 per kilowatt per month in 2025, up from a range of $110 to $150 in 2024. The same increases were absorbed in other data centers markets such as Atlanta, according to the report, which attributed the difference to financing structures.
Moody’s said more projects are allowing construction debt to be fully repaid to lenders within long initial lease terms, which often exceed 15 years, thus reducing credit risk and expanding more access to capital. That shift allows developers to push forward with costly builds despite rising construction delivery costs.
“To balance the uncertainty of a rapidly growing market, an increasing number of new financings are being structured with the ability to fully repay their construction debt within their initial lease term without any extensions or renewals,” the report said. “This lowers the credit risk of the data center project financing compared to data centers that are exposed to lease renewal risk to repay their development financing.”
Most development capital to date has come from project finance, corporate bank loans, private capital, developer equity or tenant equity, said Moody’s, adding that this trend will continue in 2026.
