The Hidden Economy Powering AI: Inside the Data Centre Boom

The rise of artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping the global economy, not through flashy consumer apps alone, but through a massive build-out of physical infrastructure. Behind every chatbot answer and image generator prompt sits an energy-hungry data centre packed with powerful chips. This demand is turning the AI data centre economy into one of the fastest-growing investment themes in tech. Analysts estimate the global AI data centre market could soar from $236 billion in 2025 to over $933 billion by 2030, growing at more than 31% annually, as companies race to deploy the computers needed for modern AI systems.

At the centre of this boom are the hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Together which control roughly 59% of global hyperscale compute capacity, giving them an enormous head start in the AI arms race. These companies are no longer just renting server space, they are building what are essentially AI factories, filled with thousands of GPUs and custom accelerators designed to train and run large language models. Their advantage is not just size, but integration: customers who already use Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, or Amazon’s cloud services naturally stay within those ecosystems for AI as well.

The financial scale of this transformation is staggering. Global data centre capital spending is projected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2029, growing at around 21% annually, with AI workloads now driving a large share of that investment. These facilities require far more than just servers: they need reinforced power grids, advanced cooling systems, and high-speed networking. In many regions, utilities and governments are scrambling to keep up as a single AI data centre can consume as much electricity as a small city.

Beyond the cloud giants, hardware companies and specialized operators are carving out powerful positions of their own. NVIDIA, whose GPUs power most AI workloads today, has become a central pillar of the entire ecosystem. Its recent $2 billion investment in CoreWeave, a fast-growing AI-focused data centre company, highlights how tightly hardware and infrastructure are now intertwined.

Looking ahead, the dominance of today’s big players is likely to persist, not because innovation will slow, but because scale matters more than ever. Building and running AI data centres requires billions in upfront capital, long-term energy contracts, and deep software-hardware integration. While energy costs, sustainability concerns, and grid constraints will shape how fast the sector grows, the direction is clear: as AI becomes embedded in everything from healthcare to finance, data centres will become the quiet backbone of the digital economy. The companies that already control the infrastructure, the chips, and the developer ecosystems are best positioned to stay on top, even as the AI wave keeps getting bigger.