The report points to a $3tn investment “supercycle” as AI reshapes infrastructure demand, energy strategies and capital markets worldwide.

AI is emerging as the dominant growth driver. JLL expects AI workloads to account for around half of all data centre capacity by the end of the decade, up from roughly a quarter in 2025.

The shift reflects both the scale of training models and the rapid growth of inference at the edge and within enterprise environments, with a key inflection point anticipated in 2027 when inference overtakes training as the primary workload.

Meeting this demand will require enormous capital deployment. JLL estimates up to $3tn of total investment over the next five years, including $1.2tn in real estate value creation and around $870bn in new debt financing.

Hyperscalers alone are expected to allocate around $1tn to data centre spend between 2024 and 2026, underscoring the intensity of competition for capacity, land and power.

Despite the pace of growth, JLL argues the sector’s fundamentals remain strong. Global occupancy stands at about 97%, while 77% of the current construction pipeline is already pre-committed to tenants. Lease rates are forecast to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 5% through 2030, with the Americas leading at 7% as supply constraints tighten further.

Regionally, the Americas will remain the largest market, representing around half of global capacity and posting the fastest growth rate. Asia-Pacific capacity is projected to increase from 32GW to 57GW by 2030, driven primarily by colocation demand, while on-premise enterprise capacity continues to decline as cloud migration accelerates.

Europe, the Middle East and Africa are expected to add 13GW of new supply, with growth concentrated in established hubs such as London, Frankfurt and Paris, alongside emerging Middle Eastern markets pursuing national digital transformation strategies.

Energy availability is emerging as the single biggest constraint on future development. In many primary markets, grid connection lead times now exceed four years, forcing operators to rethink traditional approaches. Some markets, including Dublin and parts of Texas, have effectively adopted “bring your own power” models, while others are seeing operators directly fund on-site or nearby generation.

JLL notes diverging regional strategies. In the US, natural gas is playing an increasingly important role as both temporary bridge power and permanent on-site generation. In EMEA, hybrid models combining renewables with private wire transmission can cut power costs by up to 40% compared with grid supply.

Battery energy storage systems are also gaining traction, helping manage short-duration outages and accelerate grid interconnection timelines, while solar-plus-storage is expected to become a core component of data centre energy strategies by 2030.

Capital markets are evolving in parallel. Core investment strategies now account for nearly a quarter of fundraising activity, up from less than 10% previously, while global data centre M&A has exceeded $300bn since 2020. Looking ahead, JLL expects more activity in recapitalisations and joint ventures, alongside rapid growth in ABS and CMBS issuance to finance expansion at scale.

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