Global data centre capital expenditure is approaching $1 trillion in 2026. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft alone have committed nearly $600 billion between them. The pipeline stands at 770 planned hyperscale facilities worldwide, with total capacity expected to double within three years.
The capital is committed. The question is whether anyone can actually build it all.
Why It Matters Now
The numbers landing in February 2026 are staggering. Dell'Oro Group's latest forecast projects worldwide data centre capex reaching $1.7 trillion by 2030, with accelerated AI servers accounting for two-thirds of total infrastructure spending by the end of the decade. Oracle launched its Stargate I campus in Abilene, Texas, at 1.2 GW with over 450,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs and six more buildings are due by mid-2026.
But here is the counterweight: as of mid-2025, more than 36 hyperscale projects representing $162 billion in investment were either blocked or significantly delayed. Power grid constraints, community opposition, and equipment lead times have created a delivery crisis that capital alone cannot solve.
The industry is learning what energy megaproject teams have known for decades: writing the cheque is the easy part.
The Power Wall
The bottleneck has shifted decisively. Between 2021 and 2024, the constraint was IT hardware, servers, GPUs, and networking equipment with lead times stretching to 52 weeks. That era is over. The limiting factor is now electricity.
US interconnection queues are delaying projects by years. High-voltage transformer lead times have stretched beyond 36 months. Gartner predicts power shortages will operationally constrain 40% of AI data centres by 2027. In Europe, connection lead times in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Dublin now run to ten years in some cases.
The hyperscalers' response has been to become their own utilities. Google, Intersect Power, and TPG have committed $20 billion to captive clean energy generation. Meta's Hyperion project in Louisiana is being purpose-built around gas turbines. The Stargate campus in Texas runs on onsite generation from GE Vernova and Solar Turbines. This is no longer data centre construction, it is energy infrastructure delivery at industrial scale.
The Delivery Gap No One Talks About
Capital commitments are accelerating. Delivery capability is not.
Building a 500 MW hyperscale campus with onsite power generation, liquid cooling, and high-density GPU racks is closer in complexity to an LNG terminal than a traditional data centre. It involves fuel supply agreements, emissions permitting, turbine commissioning sequences, high-voltage switchgear, and cooling systems — all integrated into a schedule where a two-month slip on any critical path cascades into revenue loss measured in hundreds of millions.
Yet most hyperscale developers are managing these programmes with the same governance structures designed for 10 MW colocation facilities. The project management methodologies, risk frameworks, and reporting cadences have not scaled with the ambition.
This is where projects fail,not at the investment committee, but in the field. When the interface between power infrastructure and IT load is not governed as a single integrated programme, schedule risk compounds and cost overruns follow.
/pmo "Hyperscale has reached the complexity threshold where it stops being a technology project and becomes an energy megaproject. The governance must match the scale or the scale will overwhelm the governance."
Where the Nordics and the Gulf Are Getting It Right
While Virginia faces community lawsuits and grid saturation, and European hubs struggle with permitting pauses, two regions are demonstrating what disciplined hyperscale delivery looks like.
In the Nordics, Finland added over 1,400 MW of IT load in 2023–2024. The country generates 95% of its electricity from carbon-neutral sources, offers uniform power pricing, and has streamlined permitting for strategic infrastructure. Sweden's wind power runs at $0.03/kWh, a 40–60% cost advantage over Western Europe. Norway's qualified supply has grown at a 43% five-year CAGR. The model works because power, planning, and policy move together.
In the Gulf, sovereign-backed capital meets abundant natural gas and decades of turbine operations expertise. Qatar's Facility E IWPP — a 2.4 GW gas-fired project — is already under EPC contract. Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN initiative targets 1.9 GW by 2030. The region's advantage is not just energy, it is the operational discipline earned on $10 billion LNG programmes applied to hyperscale delivery.
Both regions share something the overheated US market increasingly lacks: predictable power, coordinated planning, and programme governance that matches the scale of ambition.
The Hive Platform
PMO Hive's heritage in energy megaprojects, LNG, offshore platforms, and critical national infrastructure, translates directly into the governance hyperscale now demands. Our independent programme oversight provides the schedule risk analysis, EPC contractor management, and commissioning readiness assurance that trillion-dollar build programmes require.
When hyperscale delivery reaches energy megaproject complexity, it needs energy megaproject discipline. That is what the Hive Platform delivers.