Infrastructure Investment Outlook 2026

Two figures frame the 2026 infrastructure picture. Global investment in the energy transition reached approximately USD 2.3 trillion in 2025, an increase of around 8% on the prior year. Separately, global private infrastructure activity totalled around USD 1.56 trillion in 2025, concentrated in the power and digital sectors.

Those two markets are increasingly the same market.

Data centres as an infrastructure asset class

Data centre infrastructure spending is projected to approach USD 7 trillion over the next five years. The major hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta — are expected to deploy more than USD 600 billion of capital expenditure in 2026, roughly USD 230 billion above their 2025 commitments. Close to 100 GW of new data centre capacity is expected to be added between 2026 and 2030, approximately doubling global capacity.

For valuation and project monitoring, this is a shift in asset character. A data centre is a real estate asset, an energy asset and a technology asset simultaneously, and its value depends on power availability as much as on location or building specification.

Time-to-power is the new underwriting metric

Access to reliable electricity has overtaken capital and land as the principal constraint on growth. Grid congestion, interconnection queues and substantial upfront utility deposits have made time-to-power the defining metric in underwriting.

This has direct consequences for how these projects should be assessed. A site with planning consent but a multi-year interconnection wait is not comparable to an otherwise identical site with firm grid capacity, and a valuation that treats them as equivalent will be wrong by a wide margin.

Capital is broad-based

Institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and private credit providers are expected to remain central to infrastructure funding. Growth in energy investment is being driven across the full mix — natural gas, renewables and nuclear — rather than by renewables alone, reflecting the scale of demand from electrification and computing.

What we would watch

Grid connection status as a valuation input. It should be documented explicitly, with its own risk assessment, not folded into a general development risk premium.

Construction cost and programme risk. With this volume of simultaneous construction, contractor capacity and equipment lead times become material to delivery, which is precisely what independent project monitoring exists to track.

Concentration risk in demand. A large share of the data centre pipeline depends on capital expenditure decisions by a small number of counterparties. That is a genuine sensitivity in any long-dated cash flow built on it.