Omdia expects datacenter capex to hit $1.6T by 2030

"Datacenter capital expenditure is forecast to grow 17 percent annually through 2030, reaching $1.6 trillion, with supply chain constraints pushing up the price of components. The latest Cloud and Datacenter Market Snapshot [PDF] from analyst Omdia states that investment into AI infrastructure continues apace, despite all the talk of it being a bubble ready to burst. However, adoption of AI remains relatively low, it claims, with many more users and higher usage per user expected."

"So much so that Omdia expects datacenter capex to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17 percent over the next several years, touching $1.6 trillion by 2030. Whether this is sustainable is a good question. Management consultant Bain & Company calculated that the industry will have to make $2 trillion in annual sales by 2030 to afford the forecast level of investment, yet returns on all this spending are still somewhat elusive for vendors and users."

"Omdia considered four scenarios in coming to its own conclusion. The first takes into account the actual order pipeline and demand, balancing it against constraints such as Nvidia's order backlog for GPUs, and that datacenter construction is lagging behind deal announcements. This is considered the most likely outcome. The second scenario is based on the possibility that constraints have a lesser impact in the short term, producing an accelerated pace of development that results in failure for some developers."

Datacenter capital expenditure is forecast to grow at a 17 percent compound annual rate through 2030, reaching $1.6 trillion as AI infrastructure investment accelerates. AI adoption remains relatively low, but expected user growth and increased per-user compute raise demand. Models are expanding and require more inference compute, driving higher-performance infrastructure and increased server, rack, and datacenter power density. Supply chain constraints and GPU backlogs are inflating component prices and delaying construction. Analysts present multiple scenarios balancing order pipelines, constraints, and potential overinvestment, while industry revenue requirements and returns on investment remain uncertain.

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