Data Centers Will Need $3 Trillion Through 2030, Moody’s Says

At least $3 trillion is set to flow into data-center-related investments over the next five years, capital that will rely on the might of multiple areas of the credit markets to provide, according to Moody’s Ratings.

Trillions of dollars will need to be invested across servers, computing equipment, data center facilities and new power capacity, and support the boom in artificial intelligence and cloud computing, the ratings firm said in a report on Monday.

Much of that capital will come directly from big tech companies, which are facing rising demand for data centers and the power needed to operate them. Six US hyperscalers — Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc., Oracle Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and CoreWeave Inc. — are on track to hit $500 billion in data center investments this year, as capacity growth continues, said Moody’s.

Banks will continue to play a “prominent role” in providing financings, and other institutional investors will increasingly lend alongside banks given the vast amounts of capital required, according to the report.

Moody’s also estimates that more US data centers will tap into the asset-backed securities, commercial mortgage-backed securities and private credit markets when it comes time to refinance debt. New financings will grow in size and concentration, per the report, after record levels of issuance in 2025.

In the US ABS market specifically, about $15 billion was issued in 2025, with Moody’s expecting volume to “grow considerably” this year in part due to data center construction loans.

The vast amounts of debt required to support the AI revolution have raised some concerns that a bubble may be building, and could eventually harm equity and credit investors if some of the technology underperforms high expectations.

Demand to construct new data center capacity, however, shows no signs of slowing. Moody’s projects the race to build new capacity is still in its “early stages,” with growth poised to continue globally over the next 12 to 18 months.

Capacity “will be needed at some point in the next 10 years or so,” said John Medina, senior vice president at Moody’s, adding that the pace of adoption is hard to predict as new technologies continue to emerge. “A ChatGPT that didn’t exist three years ago now uses a lot of compute.”

Photo: An Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Photographer: Nathan Howard/Bloomberg