Dell'Oro raises 2026 global data center capex forecast past $1 trillion on AI buildout

Dell'Oro Group raised its forecast for worldwide data center capital expenditure to more than $1 trillion for 2026, citing an AI-infrastructure buildout and steep increases in memory and storage costs. The firm published the projection on June 10, 2026 alongside its first-quarter Data Center IT Capex report.

The top four US cloud providers — Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — lifted data center capex 78 percent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, according to Dell'Oro's first-quarter data center capex report. The firm attributes the jump to AI infrastructure spending and rising component prices. Baron Fung, senior research director at Dell'Oro, said rising memory and storage pricing substantially increased server-system costs and will likely remain a major driver of capex growth.

A $1 trillion annual run-rate would mark a step change in how much of the global technology budget flows into AI-ready infrastructure, concentrated among a handful of hyperscalers. Dell'Oro expects growth to accelerate in the second half of 2026 as NVIDIA Rubin systems ramp and hyperscalers refresh their custom-accelerator platforms. In the first quarter, Dell led server-OEM revenue, followed by Supermicro and Lenovo, though white-box vendors that build directly for hyperscalers accounted for the majority of server revenue, the firm said.

These are Dell'Oro's own estimates, drawn from the firm's research; the full report sits behind a paywall and the figures are not independently verified. Capex outlooks can move quickly if AI demand or memory pricing shifts, and the firm frames the numbers as projections rather than booked spending.

Looking further out, Dell'Oro projects worldwide data center capex will reach $1.7 trillion by 2030, with accelerated AI servers potentially making up roughly two-thirds of total data center infrastructure spending by then. Whether that trajectory holds will hinge on sustained AI workloads and the pace of the NVIDIA Rubin transition.