Data center demand from Big Tech is exploding, with last quarter’s leasing boom setting an all-time record for the industry, a new report shows.
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Hyperscalers leased approximately 7.4 gigawatts of U.S. data center capacity in the third quarter of this year. That is more capacity than was leased in all of 2024, according to a TD Cowen note published Monday.
The record quarter brings cumulative hyperscale leasing so far in 2025 to around 11.3GW. By comparison, 2024 saw 7GW of similar leases, while 5GW were leased in 2023 as the AI data center arms race first kicked into gear.
The “staggering” jump in hyperscale leasing, which the report’s authors labeled as “The Great Acceleration,” marks the most significant inflection point in demand since the data center industry began, according to TD Cowen. And demand is set to accelerate further, with an active U.S. leasing pipeline of close to 10.2GW signaling further leasing momentum through the end of the year.
Oracle accounted for the largest share of leasing demand during the record Q3, much of it meant to supply capacity to OpenAI through the Stargate data center joint venture. Oracle alone secured 5.4GW of data center inventory last quarter, signing deals for sites in Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Missouri, among others.
But Oracle was far from the only hyperscaler aggressively pursuing data center capacity.
Google ranked second in leasing, securing close to 600MW during the quarter. The third-highest leasing total was not from one of the traditional cloud giants, but from Fluidstack, a graphics processing unit neocloud that that provides much of the computing power for AI startup Anthropic. Meta and Amazon followed with 200MW and 300MW of new leased capacity, respectively.
TD Cowen’s leasing data is based on deals its analysts are aware of through so-called channel checks. These include due diligence on major data center equipment suppliers and other players in the development supply chain.
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