Global spending on data centers grew 92 percent in the second quarter of 2026 compared with a year earlier, according to research firm Dell’Oro Group, a rate of expansion that shows the AI buildout still accelerating rather than cooling. The report, released on September 16, pointed to two drivers: demand for AI servers and rising storage costs.
The number is the kind of figure that explains the entire market moment in one line. The companies that sell into data centers, the chipmakers, the server vendors, the networking and cooling suppliers, have spent two years riding a wave of orders, and a 92 percent year-over-year increase suggests the wave has not crested.
Dell’Oro’s framing matters because it ties the spending to two distinct forces. AI servers are the obvious one; the accelerators and memory that train and run models have been in structural shortage for most of two years, and the companies buying them have shown no sign of slowing their orders.
The second driver is less celebrated but no less real. Storage costs have risen as the industry builds out capacity to hold the data that AI systems generate and consume, and as component prices have climbed. Storage has been the quieter half of the AI buildout, and Dell’Oro’s report puts it alongside servers as a reason the spending keeps climbing.
The 92 percent figure carries a warning inside it, too. Spending growth of that size cannot continue forever, and the companies that sell into the market are valued partly on the assumption that it will. A quarter this strong raises the bar for the next one, and any sign of a slowdown will be read hard.
The report lands in a week when the market has been asking exactly that question. Shares of memory makers and AI suppliers had weakened in the days before the release, as investors debated whether the leading AI labs were preparing to slow frontier development and whether higher interest rates would make the buildout more expensive to finance.
Dell’Oro’s data is backward-looking, and the tension in the market is about the future. A 92 percent increase tells you what already happened; it says nothing about whether the next round of orders will be placed at the same pace. Analysts said the forward-looking signal will come from the suppliers’ own guidance in the weeks ahead.
The report also underscores how concentrated the spending is. A handful of large technology companies account for the majority of data-center capital expenditure, and their budgets, not the broader economy, determine the trajectory. When those companies signal a change of direction, the entire supply chain feels it at once.
For the companies that build and equip data centers, the Dell’Oro number is a validation of a strategy that has required enormous investment of their own. Chipmakers and server makers have added capacity, built factories and signed multiyear supply agreements on the expectation that the demand would keep coming, and the second-quarter figures suggest they read the market correctly.
The risk, analysts said, is that the spending is being financed on terms that cannot last. Data centers are capital-intensive, and much of the current buildout has been supported by cheap debt and by the equity of companies whose valuations depend on continued growth. A rise in interest rates, the subject of the Federal Reserve meeting happening the same week, changes that arithmetic.
For now, the report gives the bulls a number to cite and the skeptics a question to keep asking. The spending that Dell’Oro measured is real, and it is enormous. What the market wants to know is whether the third quarter will look like the second, and that answer has not been written yet.
The spending Dell’Oro measures is concentrated among a handful of hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, whose data-center budgets have become the single most important variable in the technology economy. Their combined capital expenditure now dwarfs that of any other group of companies, and the suppliers that serve them rise and fall on their plans.
The buildout is running into physical limits. The power to run new data centers has become scarce in many regions, and the industry has begun signing deals for electricity years in advance. Those constraints have not stopped the spending, but they have raised its cost and stretched its timelines.
Storage’s role in the report is easy to overlook but hard to overstate. The data AI systems generate must be held somewhere, and the memory and disk makers that serve the market have watched prices climb as demand outran supply. The same shortage that has lifted chipmakers has reached the storage aisle.
Dell’Oro is one of several firms that track the market, and its 92 percent figure sits near the top of the range others have reported. The exact number will be revised as more companies disclose, but the direction is not in dispute: the second quarter was one of the strongest on record for the people who build the internet’s physical layer.
The report’s final implication is the simplest. The AI buildout is not a story about software alone, and it never was. It is a story about concrete, copper and silicon, and the 92 percent increase is the clearest measure yet of how much of all three the world has been buying.
