#datacenter-expansion

#datacenter-expansion

"We're growing at really an unprecedented rate. Yet, I think every provider would tell you, including us, that we could actually grow faster if we had all the supply that we could take," he said on the company's Thursday earnings call. "And so we are being incredibly scrappy around that. If you look in the last 12 months, we added 3.9 gigawatts of power. Just for perspective, that's twice what we had in 2022....We expect to double it again by the end of 2027."

A looming shortage of electrical power is set to constrain datacenter expansion, potentially leaving many industry growth forecasts looking overly optimistic. In its latest report, " Five Predictions for 2026," Uptime Institute says that power will become the defining constraint on datacenter growth in 2026 and beyond. This is because it simply isn't possible to add extra grid and generating capacity at the same rate as new server farms are popping up, so something is going to have to give.

Zuckercorp has already warned of "notably larger" spending in 2026, but the company earned "only" $62 billion in profit last year, up from $39 billion in 2023. So even if it used all of its near-liquid assets - as of Q3, Meta had about $44.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and other marketable securities - and plowed every dollar of profit into bit barns for the next few years, Meta would be hard pressed to pull this off.

Alibaba Cloud yesterday announced its first datacenters in Brazil, France, and The Netherlands, plus expansion of its presence in five other countries outside China. The cloudy offshoot of giant e-tailer Alibaba already operates 91 availability zones in 29 regions, 14 of which are in China - a market in which it enjoys dominant market share thanks to both its solid offerings and the fact that global rivals AWS, Azure, and Google have limited presences in the Middle Kingdom.