The data center boom is concentrated in the U.S.

Some fun facts I recently learned from JP Morgan's "Eye on the Market" (which I highly recommend)

- Tech capex in 2025 was about as much $ as the 1944 manhattan project, the 1949 electricity buildout, the 1964 Apollo project, the 1966 Interstate highway project COMBINED.

- OpenAI promised to pay Oracle $60B, which it doesn't earn yet; in return Oracle promised to provide them cloud facilities they haven't built yet. These will require over 2 Hoover dams worth of power.

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Is this just the efficiency of the US financial market?

Does the acceleration outperform governments in other countries?

(that said, title seems to imply US thinking on datacenters is different/wrong/etc)

It’s all broadly backed by a bunch of IOUs issued by those with no clear path to come up with the cash to pay the bill when it comes due. Hence the rising prices of credit default swaps.

I was chatting about this with a friend. It feels like there's a real opportunity for a relatively-poor-but-democratic country to say, "Look, for real, we will pass the strongest data protection laws in the world, and we will let you build as many solar panels as you want + use as much water as you want, just sink a couple hundred billion into OUR economy."

Data Center buildouts also hot in Saudi Arabia: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/12/17/...

Stock market last 365 days:

S&P 500 - up 16%

Nvidia - up 25%

ICLN (global clean energy ETF) - up 46%

Micron - up 246%

Seagate - up 270%

Western Digital - up 342%

Scroll down a bit and the US is leading the world in 'planned' datacenters and lagging in data centers actually under construction.

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