Idc projects global data center rack count to reach 58 million by 2030

IDC's Global Half-Yearly Data Center Facilities Tracking Report forecasts a significant expansion in global data center capacity, projecting the installed rack count to grow from approximately 25 million in 2026 to 58 million by 2030. Concurrently, the report anticipates that global data center energy consumption will rise from 519 TWh in 2025 to 1308 TWh, while capital expenditure for these physical facilities is expected to climb from $276 billion in 2025 to $655 billion by 2030. These figures specifically cover physical infrastructure like power and cooling, excluding IT hardware investments. While AI infrastructure expansion demands massive physical and energy resources, IDC notes that supply constraints—such as power availability and cooling capacity—are becoming limiting factors in some markets. The research highlights that supply shortages are not universal, pointing to differing resource constraints across various regions. For the Chinese market, data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that as of June 2026, China's intelligent computing power reached 2185 EFLOPS (FP16), marking a 177% year-over-year increase, with a national utilization rate of 71.4%. The Chinese market's supply side is dominated by three major telecom operators, third-party facility providers, and hyperscale cloud service providers. Demand is diversifying beyond traditional hyperscalers, with specialized AI cloud providers and frontier model developers emerging as new buyers, driving workloads toward private and edge deployments.