Global spending on data centers could reach $31.6 trillion by 2050 according to a baseline forecast, and as much as $50 trillion if AI adoption accelerates faster than expected, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report. Even the baseline forecast is about the same size as the entire U.S. economy.
Bloomberg reports that the PwC document titled “Global Data Center Outlook,” was released today and covers 46 countries and territories across five regions. Its central scenario puts global data center capital expenditure through 2050 at $31.6 trillion, roughly equal to the size of the entire U.S. economy.
The United States is projected to take nearly half of that total, $15.1 trillion. Asia-Pacific follows at $8.2 trillion, then Europe at $5.6 trillion, the Middle East at $1.1 trillion, and Africa at $255 billion.
Annual global spending is expected to climb from about $800 billion this year to $1.1 trillion by 2030 and $1.8 trillion by 2050. China and India are expected to account for the largest share of new demand, given their large populations, growing digital economies, and room for further AI adoption.
Past infrastructure booms eventually leveled off. According to PwC, the AI data center boom will not. “Railways. Electrification. The internet. Each required enormous amounts of capital and defined an era,” PwC researchers wrote in the report. “The AI infrastructure cycle underway dwarfs all three. This one resets every four to six years and shows no signs of ending.”
That reset cycle comes down to where the money actually goes. Most of it buys hardware, GPUs, servers, storage, networking gear, that wears out and needs replacing on a regular schedule, rather than land or buildings. That’s a different shape than past capital cycles like memory chip production or global fiber rollout, which tended to front-load their spending and then coast.
PwC researchers said the scale of the spending itself isn’t really in question. “The $31.6 trillion question isn’t whether the capital exists. It does,” they wrote. “Nor is the question whether the demand is real. It is. The question is which regions, operators, and institutions are positioned to capture it and which aren’t.”
According to the report, three factors will decide how that money gets divided up: power availability, data sovereignty rules, and semiconductor supply. Of those, power is the biggest factor in where AI infrastructure investment actually lands, according to the researchers. Semiconductor supply chain disruptions, they warned, could cut global investment by nearly 20 percent. Data sovereignty pressure works differently: it’s expected to move investment around rather than shrink the total.
This massive change to the economy isn’t happening smoothly. Breitbart News previously reported that $130 billion in AI data center projects were delayed in the first three months of the year:
At least 75 projects worth about $130 billion have been blocked or delayed from January through March across the country as a result of data center opponents, according to a Data Center Watch study obtained by NBC News.
The authors of the study further noted that this hindering of AI data centers is the most on record in a three-month period since they began tracking the matter in 2023.
“The quarter reflected a structural shift rather than a cyclical spike: communities have internalized an opposition playbook, legislative sessions introduced formal regulatory uncertainty, and the number of active opposition groups more than doubled to 833 across 49 states,” the study read.
AI data centers continue to become a major issue in political races around the country. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.