According to the latest AI industry research from TrendForce, major North American cloud service providers have recently revised their 2026 capital expenditure guidance upwards in response to robust AI demand. Consequently, TrendForce has increased its full-year capital expenditure forecast for nine leading global CSPs—including U.S.-based Google, AWS, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, as well as China-based ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu—to approximately $830 billion. The year-over-year growth rate has also been adjusted upward from 61% to 79%.
Looking at the adjustments among the four major North American CSPs: Microsoft has raised its outlook to $190 billion, reflecting a year-over-year increase of around 130%, with about $25 billion attributed to rising component costs. Google has revised its projection from $175–185 billion to $180–190 billion, more than doubling its annual growth rate. Meta has increased its capital expenditure range from $115–135 billion to $125–145 billion, representing an estimated annual growth of approximately 85%. AWS, responding to demand for AI cloud services, expects its capital expenditure to exceed $230 billion this year, growing by over 50% year-over-year.
TrendForce indicates that North American CSPs are increasing capital expenditures at a rate higher than the global average, underscoring that AI infrastructure has become a core long-term strategic focus. Investments continue to concentrate on high-performance GPU clusters, the development of self-designed ASIC chips, and next-generation data centers capable of supporting high-power computing. The significant rise in capital expenditures also signals that CSPs will continue to expand data center construction, with AWS, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle leading the effort.
According to TrendForce statistics, by the end of 2025, these five North American CSPs had deployed 800–900 data centers globally, with AWS accounting for the largest share. Among Chinese CSPs, Alibaba and ByteDance are the primary drivers of expansion, though their strategic directions differ. Alibaba, through Alibaba Cloud, focuses on local nodes and sovereign cloud services to penetrate emerging markets. Since announcing plans to establish operational regions in Brazil, France, and the Netherlands in 2025, Alibaba Cloud now covers 29 geographic regions and 94 availability zones worldwide. ByteDance, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding overseas through TikTok, with a presence in eight countries including the United States, Brazil, and Ireland. Its three major investment projects are located in Europe, Thailand, and Malaysia, making it the Chinese provider with the highest overseas deployment density.
TrendForce notes that AI demand will steadily drive the growth of global data center sites, pushing total data center power capacity to around 155 GW by 2026, a year-over-year increase of about 29%. Additionally, due to higher power consumption per unit, global AI server electricity usage is expected to surpass that of general-purpose servers by 2026. With the mass production of GB300/Rubin and ASIC AI servers anticipated between 2027 and 2028, key component markets such as HVDC and liquid cooling solutions are also projected to grow.
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