The $910B H2 2025 Global AI Buildout: Lessons from Five Regions
From North America’s $600B corridor buildout to MEA’s $100B sovereign execution, the second half of 2025 revealed how the next decade of data centers will be shaped.
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The Global Inflection Point
The second half of 2025 was not just another busy stretch for the data center industry. In six months, roughly $910 billion in announced, financed, or advanced AI-ready data center commitments accumulated across five major regions. That number is large, but the real story is not the aggregate. It is where the capital moved, how projects were structured, and which constraint stacks proved decisive.
AI infrastructure is fracturing along regional lines. North America is the most capital-dense corridor, but also the most constrained by power and permitting. South America has shifted from pipeline hype to execution triage, where grid access, FX risk, and deliverability decide survival. The Middle East and Africa are scaling through sovereign-led platforms, Asia-Pacific is industrializing via corridors and REIT-scale capital with split training and inference geographies.
Together, these shifts show the next decade will be shaped less by AI models and more by control of power, land, durable capital, and sovereign alignment.
North America: Capital Density Meets Power and Permitting Constraints
North America absorbed more than $600 billion in announced, financed, or proposed AI and data center projects during H2 2025, cementing its role as the command center of global AI compute. Virginia remains the gravitational core of the U.S. market, but what’s new is the rise of multi-gigawatt corridors in Texas, the Midwest, the Carolinas, and Alberta, Canada.
Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google are building at sovereign-scale, often tied to nuclear or utility-backed power. Virginia greenlit 900MW in a single quarter. Texas and Midwest corridors are contending with interconnection backlogs stretching years, while Alberta is emerging as a spillover hub aligned with long-duration AI workloads.
Private equity and institutional capital are layering on top. Blackstone’s utility-backed initiatives in Virginia, Brookfield’s multi-gigawatt Midwest corridors, and pension funds financing hybrid energy–compute campuses show that North America is no longer about single sites it’s about regional-scale grids synchronized with hyperscaler demand.
The bottleneck is clear: power and entitled land. Every project carries subtext about interconnection queues, transmission capacity, zoning resistance, and long-term grid resilience. Operators are securing parcels years in advance, often before permits are finalized, to get ahead of scarcity.
Read the full North America deep dive here: North America: $600B Redefines the Scale of AI & Data Center Infrastructure
Middle East & Africa: Sovereign-Led Acceleration
The Middle East and Africa crossed $100B+ in AI and data center commitments in H2 2025, but the more important shift was the quality of execution. Pipeline ambition began turning into build vehicles. Sovereign wealth funds, state telcos, and national champions increasingly structured the market through land access, power integration, and demand anchoring.
Saudi Arabia moved from opportunistic colocation to a state-backed, multi-gigawatt compute strategy. The UAE strengthened sovereign compute ecosystems that combine power planning with AI platform development.
North Africa positioned itself as an export-oriented compute hub, leveraging renewable energy and proximity to Europe. In Sub-Saharan Africa, select hyperscale-adjacent nodes matured, supported by subsea connectivity, enterprise demand, and relative political stability.
The limiting factors remain power reliability outside core Gulf markets and uneven, geopolitically mediated access to GPUs. Where sovereign alignment exists, projects move from narrative to execution. Where governance is fragmented, capital alone does not solve delivery.
Read the full Middle East & Africa deep dive here: Middle East & Africa: $100B+ AI and Data Center Buildout Redefines the Region
Asia-Pacific: Fragmented Growth, Sovereign Corridors, and Industrialization
Asia-Pacific advanced $150B+ in announced, financed, or advanced AI and data center activity in H2 2025, with the region entering an industrial phase. Unlike North America’s corridor concentration, APAC’s growth is heterogeneous: India scaling population-grade compute across multiple states, China pushing resilience by moving compute inland, Japan and Korea maturing sovereign cloud programs, and Southeast Asia consolidating into power-rich corridors.
The defining feature of H2 was that capital structure and energy strategy became the gating mechanisms. REITs, sovereign funds, and private credit scaled ownership and accelerated delivery, while green finance moved from marketing to underwriting.
APAC’s map hardened into dual-speed geography: inference stays close to dense demand centers, while GPU-heavy training moves inland toward power and land.
Delivery is constrained by grid congestion, water availability, fragmented permitting regimes, construction inflation, and shortages of AI-grade talent. In H2, APAC stopped behaving like a set of “fast-growing markets” and started behaving like an industrial system constrained by physical throughput.
Read the full Asia-Pacific deep dive here: Asia-Pacific: $150B+ AI Data Center Infrastructure Enters the Industrial Phase
South America: Execution Triage, Energy-to-Compute, and Corridor Selection
South America disclosed $60B+ in capex and financing momentum in H2 2025, but the region’s true story was selection pressure. H2 moved the market from “pipeline hype” into execution triage: financing, grid approvals, and policy durability became the dividing line between projects that proceed and projects that remain aspirational.
Brazil continued to dominate narrative gravity, but H2 highlighted that transmission and interconnection are the actual bottleneck. Mexico consolidated Querétaro as the region’s most investable hyperscale cluster, while power scarcity became the gating variable. Chile strengthened its role as a renewables-led counterbalance with lower-volatility institutional appeal.
The defining feature of H2 was the rise of energy-to-compute plays. Hydro- and gas-backed approaches positioned smaller markets to enter the AI map through power advantage rather than interconnection density. The model is compelling, but execution-sensitive: carrier-neutral connectivity, enterprise O&M maturity, and currency risk mitigation are mandatory for bankability.
Read the full South America deep dive here: South America: $60B+ AI Buildout from Sovereign Zones to Cross-Border Lanes
The Synthesis: What $910B Signals About the Next Decade
Looking across all regions, three themes stand out.
1. Power + land are the new currency.
Across regions, strategy now centers on energy deliverability and entitled land. North America is constrained by interconnect queues and zoning politics, South America by grid access and currency risk, the Middle East and Africa by sovereign control, and Asia-Pacific by power-first, water-aware corridor planning.
2. Sovereigns are no longer bystanders.
The first wave of global data centers was predominantly private-sector driven. That era is ending. Sovereign wealth funds, ministries, and state-linked utilities are now designers, co-investors, and gatekeepers. AI infrastructure is increasingly treated not as IT real estate, but as strategic national capacity.
3. Markets are bifurcating into two models.
On one side are hyperscaler-anchored giga-corridors, financed by deep private markets and executed through utility alignment. On the other are state-backed corridors and sovereign platforms, aligning compute with national policy, energy planning, and long-duration strategic capital. Investors and operators will need to navigate both simultaneously.
What Comes Next
The second half of 2025 made one thing clear for 2026: deliverability will decide outcomes. North America faces intensifying land, power, and permitting friction, while South America will reward only execution-ready platforms with credible grid and currency paths. Across the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific, sovereign influence, corridor consolidation, and the speed of grid integration and permitting will separate winners from stalled projects.
One thing is certain: the next decade of data centers will not be uniform. It will be a patchwork of corridors, sovereign strategies, and energy experiments, all feeding into the same global demand curve for AI compute.
And if H2 2025 taught the market anything, it is that the biggest numbers matter less than who can actually deliver them.