The Global AI Infrastructure Battle

The world now runs on data, with 11,800 data centers forming the backbone of AI, cloud, finance, and digital life. 
 
The United States dominates with 5,381 sites — nearly half the global total and more than the next 20 countries combined. 
 
Asia’s hubs include China, Japan, India, and Singapore, while Europe’s centers cluster in Germany, France, the U.K., and the Netherlands. Yet the world’s largest single facility is not American, but China Telecom’s Inner Mongolia Information Park.

In 2025, the U.S. is supercharging its lead with unprecedented AI infrastructure investments. 
 
Microsoft has pledged $80 billion, Amazon AWS is committing $30 billion across Georgia and Pennsylvania, Google is expanding $9 billion in Oklahoma, while Meta is building a $29 billion “Manhattan-sized” site in Louisiana.

Oracle and OpenAI are developing multi-gigawatt campuses in Texas, CoreWeave is adding 250,000 GPUs, and Elon Musk’s xAI is targeting 1 million GPUs at its Memphis “Colossus.”
 
Meanwhile, the Middle East is emerging as the next AI frontier. 
 
Saudi Arabia is scaling 42 new centers and sovereign AI projects, while the UAE’s 5 GigaWatt Abu Dhabi campus with G42 could rival U.S. mega-sites.
 
Data centers are becoming the new oil fields of the AI age. 
 
The U.S. lead remains strong, but energy-rich Gulf nations are building sovereign compute power at unmatched speed, raising the question: who will control the future of AI infrastructure?