| According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the telecommunications, security, networks, and data center industries, the worldwide data center capital expenditures accelerated sharply in 2Q 2026. Continued AI infrastructure investment supported growth across compute, storage, networking, and physical infrastructure, while rising memory and storage prices significantly increased server average selling prices. “Data center capex growth broadened in the second quarter as investment accelerated across both established Cloud service providers and emerging AI infrastructure customers,” said Baron Fung, Vice President of Research at Dell’Oro Group. “Spending remained concentrated in NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra and hyperscaler custom accelerators, while agentic AI created incremental demand for general-purpose compute, storage, and complementary networking. Neocloud providers and AI model builders are also becoming increasingly important contributors to infrastructure investment. These companies are rapidly expanding their own capacity while deepening partnerships with cloud service providers. “Looking ahead, ongoing accelerator deployments and emerging agentic AI and AI-related storage workloads should sustain strong capex growth through the remainder of 2026 and beyond, although supply constraints could limit the pace at which planned infrastructure is deployed,” explained Fung. Additional highlights from the 2Q 2026 Data Center IT Capex Quarterly Report: -
Neocloud and AI Model Builder capex grew the fastest among the customer segments, reflecting the early stages of their infrastructure buildouts. -
Higher memory and storage prices provided an additional lift to capex by driving server average selling prices higher. -
Dell led server OEM revenue, followed by Supermicro and Lenovo, while white-box server revenue reached a record high. |
