[00:00:02] This is Sales Globe Signals, and I'm Mark Danolo, and Sales Globe Signals is about asking two questions. What are the big macro market signals and what do they mean for revenue growth?
[00:00:15] And in this issue, we're looking at the data center surge. We looked at this back in October of 2025, and it was about the AI infrastructure build. And, and so we're exploring some additional points here and going a bit deeper on some of the points we covered back in October, because this has just continued, the pace has picked up and it is literally exploded.
[00:00:39] So global data center spending crossed a trillion dollars in 2026. It's become an economic force. And we talked about that back in October as well. It's not just a technology story. It's a, is an economic change economic force story.
[00:00:55] And we talked about the idea that you have these hyperscalers at the headwaters, and they're creating all this downstream demand for all these different types of services. And it's really about the data center build.
[00:01:11] I think one good analogy is the interstate highway system that was built many, many years ago. And it wasn't just about building a highway. It restructured where people lived, where they traveled, how fast they traveled, where they could go, how goods flowed. And this is kind of the same thing. It's just a major, major economic change.
[00:01:36] So I'm going to go through five signals, what they mean and what your company should be thinking about relative to these signals. And it really depends on what your industry is, what your business is, because the signals are different for companies in technology versus construction or real estate or legal or financial services.
[00:01:56] But there are all sorts of opportunities.
[00:01:59] And in the written version of this issue of Signals, we have 14 actions for 14 different industries or types of businesses that you can take. So you can check that out on LinkedIn and
[email protected] and you can see some specific things that you could do for your business.
[00:02:18] So let's set the stage.
[00:02:20] The driving force obviously is AI, and it's creating workloads that are an order of magnitude greater than traditional cloud compute. And it's creating huge amounts of demand. So every GPU cluster, you have demands around power, cooling, space, location, connectivity. And those things didn't exist at that scale before.
[00:02:45] And those are all the areas that are creating opportunities as well. And the big players we talked about, the headwaters, the big players are Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. And those are regarded generally as being the hyperscalers.
[00:03:02] Each one of those companies individually, they're committing over $100 billion in 2026 in terms of spend and that's about a 60% increase over 2025.
[00:03:14] And so the big areas, like I mentioned before, electricity rates, water tables, zoning fights, labor markets and even the night sky, we're hearing about this, not in my backyard, this NIMBY protest going on, but these are the big areas that are being impacted around what I talked about before. Power, cooling, space, connectivity.
[00:03:36] And while we hear about all these great things that are happening with AI and all these threats, there are opportunities that it's creating for businesses. So let's take a look at each one of these and we're going to go through five signals. The first one, signal one is about the level of magnitude so the spending is crossed into historic territory. We looked at some, some numbers back in last October and projections for 2025 and in 2026 we're seeing projections of a trillion dollars in data center capex. That's up about 60% from 2025.
[00:04:09] So that's a huge number.
[00:04:11] I mentioned the Hyperscalers. Amazon alone $200 billion in capex for 2026.
[00:04:18] Google 175 to 185 billion.
[00:04:22] Meta 115135 billion. Microsoft 110 to 120 billion. So these are huge, huge numbers.
[00:04:30] And the ironic thing is these are not demand or necessarily capital constrained expenditures or investments. They're supply constrained.
[00:04:45] So remember supply chain issues came up a few years ago post Covid we're hitting it again because for the demand and the pre committed volume for these data centers they can't get the supplies they need, they can't get all of the compute, the wiring, the materials that they need. So there's supply constraint. Right now US construction starts are at a record right now. $77 billion in 2025, that's up almost 200% year over year.
[00:05:15] And so huge huge expenditures.
[00:05:18] So that's first signal. What does it mean for profitable revenue growth? Well let's look at some, some industries, construction, engineering, infrastructure services.
[00:05:27] Those types of businesses, those types of companies have multi year demand ahead of them that's already pre committed.
[00:05:35] So when the data centers have been identified in terms of where they're going, this money is going to be spent. So there's a huge pipeline ahead for these types of companies.
[00:05:46] Financial services, the hyperscalers need financing so private equity, infrastructure funds, REITs, project finance.
[00:05:57] Interesting thing is they raised 108 billion in debt in 2025. And if you remember the news items back in 2024 and early 2025 the hyperscalers were spending all sorts of money. They had all sorts of cash flow, right? And they had billions or hundreds of billions of dollars and in cash to spend. And then there was a big concern because they started switching over to debt financing.
[00:06:27] And everybody's like, are they getting ahead of themselves? Well, the debt financing is huge right now. $108 billion in debt in 2025. So that's becoming a de facto method of building data centers or financing data centers, the technology companies. That's another opportunity from the size of the build. So the cost of inference, AI inference, meaning the cost of computer to actually run AI models, is falling, which means that it's becoming more realistic and more accessible to companies that are not huge companies, so small and midsize businesses, which means that it gives them opportunities to be able to create new products and services. So if your business is not thinking about what you're doing with AI, not just to improve necessarily efficiency by, you know, having it do do memos and emails and things for you, but what products and what services you can develop for your business because of the low, lower cost of AI compute, there's a huge opportunity. So if you're not doing that, you're missing something you need to be thinking about. What do we do in terms of our offers that can be enhanced and scaled and made even better with AI?
[00:07:41] Okay, Signal two hyperscalers control the flow and the power. Okay, so we talked about electricity. We talked about water just a few minutes ago. Let's talk about those things in a little bit more detail here.
[00:07:52] Around electricity. Data centers consume 6% of all U.S. electricity in terms of new electricity demand, 50% of all new new U.S. electricity demand growth in 2025.
[00:08:05] If you look at specific areas, Virginia alone. Virginia has almost 700 data centers. They're the largest.
[00:08:14] That's over 25% of the state's entire electric supply that they're using.
[00:08:20] So huge demand by 2030, projected to reach nearly 8% of national US consumption. So there's a huge demand on electricity, and the rates are rising for everyone as well. So if you look at that, what they call the PJM grid, which is Pennsylvania, Jersey and Maryland, which is actually 13 states, 65 million people.
[00:08:43] So that would be covering the East Coast Power supply costs jumped from 2.2 billion to 14.7 billion in one year.
[00:08:52] And the data centers were about two thirds of that increase. And if you look at the increase in electricity rates nationally, electrical rates have gone up 30% in the past five years since 2020.
[00:09:07] Northeast 39% West, 42%, Midwest and South a little bit more moderate. So electricity rates are going up and a lot of that's being driven by the data centers. On the flip side, also, tax revenues are going up for these communities that have the data centers because they're paying bigger taxes and there's more benefit to the community as well.
[00:09:32] Water, that's the second binding constraint. So North American data centers consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025. Let's put it in context. A large data center consumes about 5 million gallons per day of water. That's equivalent to residential demand of 50,000 people. So one data center on a daily basis consumes the equivalent of 50,000 people's worth of consumption of water, which is huge.
[00:10:00] So what does that mean for profitable revenue growth?
[00:10:03] Well, the energy companies, utilities, renewable power developers, have huge opportunities because there are opportunities to provide that power. The hyperscalers are now going direct. They're becoming their own utilities.
[00:10:16] So they're doing direct contracting with the, with the new, with producers.
[00:10:21] So companies in the space that can offer guaranteed power supply, guaranteed capacity and storage at scale are going to have a real opportunity.
[00:10:30] Same for water companies, companies in the water technology and water management business.
[00:10:35] So liquid cooling, immersion cooling, closed loop water systems.
[00:10:40] And on an international sense, you can see some other things happening in emea.
[00:10:46] Renewable energy grids. So EMEA is going green, obviously that's in private wire transmission. That's cutting power costs up to 40%. So they're doing some things in another direction there. Asia Pacific, they're using the data center investment as a catalyst for modernizing their grid.
[00:11:05] And Latin America, Brazil is booming. That's the dominant hub for renewable energy and also for data center build.
[00:11:13] Signal three. It's about geography. So it's not just happening in one place. Data centers aren't being built everywhere. They're being built in certain places. And I mentioned Virginia before. Northern Virginia specifically is the data center capital of the world. They've got 655 operating facilities and they call that data center alley. So they have the most right now.
[00:11:38] Texas is growing the fastest. So Texas has 140 data centers underway as of March 2026. They're just ahead of Virginia, which has about 136.
[00:11:50] Georgia is also in the forefront, 56 projects under construction.
[00:11:56] And then the big shift is into other markets, other secondary markets. West Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, Oklahoma.
[00:12:10] And so rural America is experiencing a surge or a boom in terms of data center development.
[00:12:18] And you were talking about history of the highway system before just a couple minutes ago. But this is kind of the next biggest thing that's happened to rural America since the electrification back in the 1930s. If you think back during our grandparents era, that's when all the power was going in out in rural areas and people were getting electricity. Never had it before. So we're seeing new development in rural areas like we haven't seen before.
[00:12:44] So 73% of the new data center construction is happening in the rural markets.
[00:12:49] Internationally, Asia Pacific, fastest growing, projected to expand from 32 gigawatts to 57 gigawatts by 2030. That's a 12% compound annual growth rate. Latin America talked about Brazil. $11 billion invested in 2025. Brazil is nearly 40% of that.
[00:13:10] So what does that mean for profitable revenue growth? Well, companies in construction, logistics facilities, local professional services. Look at the markets that you're in.
[00:13:20] So if you're on just the coastal markets or the highly populated markets, that's probably not the place to be. So look at where the data centers are coming in. That's where the demand is going to come in. Real estate developers and investors, industrial land near transmission facilities and infrastructure in rural and secondary markets. That's a big opportunity. So we talked about West Texas, Midwest, Southeast for supply chain companies.
[00:13:48] A data center in a rural area like Wyoming is going to need the same kind of facilities in terms of H VAC and compute switching gear fiber as one in Northern Virginia or somewhere else on the East Coast.
[00:14:02] So the bill of materials is going to be the same.
[00:14:05] The expense is probably going to be similar, but the location is going to be different. So start mapping where those opportunities are going to be and start covering in terms of your market coverage in those areas.
[00:14:16] Signal 4 the NIMBY backlash is real and it's creating risks and it's also creating opportunities.
[00:14:24] NIMBY not in my backyard. So we don't want data centers in our backyard. From May 2024 to March of 2025, $64 billion in U.S. projects delayed or blocked by opposition. So protests about data centers, protests about what AI is going to do to our lives. $64 billion of development has been delayed, so project cancellations have quadrupled.
[00:14:49] More than 300 state level data center bills were filed in the first six weeks of 2026 alone. So it's a significant concern, It's a significant force.
[00:14:59] We talked about water consumption and power consumption before. One large data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 homes.
[00:15:08] So when you think about what's happening in A rural area, that's a significant impact. You've got noise, you've got construction traffic, you've got the visual transformation of communities. What are going to look like with big data centers in them. And then you've got residential electricity rates potentially going up as well, like I talked about before.
[00:15:25] But on the flip side, the data centers are one of the biggest contributors to those communities in terms of tax revenues, jobs. One data center job creates six jobs outside of the data center. So there are a lot of opportunities as well. So what does it mean for profitable revenue growth? Companies in environmental consulting, permitting, community engagement, public affairs siting and location.
[00:15:51] Basically companies that can help data centers locate better and locate well and do it well by by those communities are going to be big opportunities. There also includes water efficient cooling, power decoupled from the grid, that type of thing, and signal five data centers moving to space.
[00:16:11] This would have sounded like science fiction just 18 months or two years ago, but companies are actually doing it right now. Star Cloud, backed by Nvidia, they launched the first GPU enabled satellite in November 2025.
[00:16:26] SpaceX has filed plans with the FCC for up to 1 million orbital data center satellites.
[00:16:33] And so this is happening and it's real.
[00:16:36] And it's not that we're necessarily running out of space. We don't want it in our backyard. Space is not necessarily our backyard, but we don't want in our backyard. But there is an opportunity in space that doesn't exist as easily here on Earth, which is the two areas that we talked about before, which is unlimited power, solar power, closer to the sun and natural cooling. So we're talking about water being in huge demand here on Earth, but in space you don't need water for cooling because space is cold. So there's some, some benefits definitely of doing it in space.
[00:17:11] The orbital data Data center market, $500 million in 2025, projected to be $39 billion by 2035 in just 10 years.
[00:17:21] So huge, huge opportunity there. What does it mean for profitable revenue growth? Aerospace, defense, satellite manufacturers, launch service providers, those are all opportunities. If you're in those markets, this is going to be the most significant new infrastructure category and in a generation. So this is a big opportunity. If you're doing compute, if you can do radiation hardened compute, all sorts of opportunities there, workforce development, community colleges, technical training. We're going to need more people that can do the jobs to build all these things because they get built before they go out into space. So electricians, H vac network engineers, security specialists, they don't need the H Vac in space that's going to be down here before they go to space. But basically opportunities to build for the launch into space.
[00:18:14] So if you're in those markets, take a look, see where those opportunities might be. And again, take a look at the 14 industries and 14 actions, or 14 opportunities that are an addendum to the written sales globe signals.
[00:18:28] So your call to action.
[00:18:31] The data center surge is not a technology story. It is an infrastructure story. It is a major build, something we probably won't see again for another generation. So it's a huge opportunity. We know where things are happening, we know where the build is going to be, we know what's going to be needed in the build. So it's a big opportunity for organizations, depending on your industry.
[00:18:53] And as I mentioned before, look at those 14 opportunities, those 14 actions for 14 different industries in the written version of signals, and you can check that out and see what it means for your business.
[00:19:03] And as you look at it, look at the signals from two angles. How they're gonna affect your customers and their ability to grow. And how are they gonna affect your business, your revenue model, your cost structure, your talent pipeline, your competitive position.
[00:19:17] And don't be the company that wakes up in 2030 wondering what happened, because you need to plan right now for it. And you can get the full written issue sales globe signals and all the charts and all the
[email protected] or at LinkedIn. And if you want to talk about what it means for your business, you can reach out to
[email protected] thanks for listening.
