The facilities that house compute and storage — now reshaped by power constraints and the AI build-out.
Last updated 14 Jun 2026
Data centres are the buildings that house the servers, storage and networking behind the cloud. The market spans neutral colocation, where many tenants share a facility, and hyperscale campuses operated by the largest cloud providers.
The defining issue of the decade is electricity. The surge in AI compute is pushing rack densities and campus power requirements to levels that strain grids, making power availability — not land or fibre — the binding constraint on where capacity gets built.
A combination of geography, neutral exchanges and abundant power turned a single German city into the gravitational centre of European internet traffic.
By David Okafor · Data Centre Correspondent
Faced with land and power limits, Singapore paused new data-centre builds — then reopened the market on its own sustainability terms.
By David Okafor · Data Centre Correspondent