Critical Load: Why everyone wants data centres

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
I mean, I think what's going on in the US is just staggering in terms of size. I think one stat I saw was that at various stages of construction at the moment, you've got 35 gigawatts worth of data centers, which to put that in context is half the amount of the power that Germany uses. Like it's just a ginormous build out.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
The manned signal are very strong, and they're not just strong, they are accelerating. It's exciting to be investing into that space.
Everybody wants to invest in a booming market, but this market is a market where things change at a pace faster than people can process.

**Jan Vesely** (0:39)
Four trillion of data center investments happening by the hyperscalers by 2030 alone, including the chips 500 billion just this year by the top four companies. I mean, these numbers are mind-blowing.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:52)
The space is crowded, as we said. There are myriad kinds of investors that are looking at it, not just infrastructure investors, but real estate investors and then PEs, the sovereign funds, specialist GPs. Everyone is looking at the sector and investing in the sector.

**James Lineker** (1:10)
The sector that everyone is investing in? Data centers. All four of those quotes came from Infrastructure Investor Network's global summit in Berlin this year, where three and a half thousand fund managers, institutional investors, policymakers and more gathered to discuss all things infrastructure. And as these soundbites suggest, all things infrastructure kept coming back to data centers. It's easy to see why. Estimates vary, but McKinsey believes global spending on data centers could reach $7 trillion by 2030 Bloomberg NEF reports that more than 23 gigawatts of data center capacity was under construction as of late 2025, with around three quarters of that in the US.
It's a red-hot sector, it's awash with capital, it's rich with opportunity. But it's not without its critics. Over the course of this four-part mini-series, we'll explore why that is and go deep on the opportunities and risks of data centers. I'm James Lineker with PEI Group and The Infrastructure Investor Podcast. And this is Critical Load, Inside the Data Centre Boom.
Oh, and by the way, we'll be rolling out this series over the coming weeks. But if you enjoy this episode and don't want to have to wait for the next one, the whole series is available now if you follow the link in the episode description and fill out our registration form. It only takes a minute. That's full access right now with no waiting. Just follow the link. But now, on with the episode.
I went to the Infrastructure Investor Network's Global Summit in Berlin, knowing that data centres were big business. But I don't think I appreciated quite how big. In this episode, the first of our series, we're going to cover what data centres physically are, we're going to look at why they're so hot right now, and we're going to start quantifying this and putting some numbers to it.
One of those voices you heard at the start was Jan Vesely, a partner at private markets behemoth EQT, which has some 266 billion euros of assets under management. It also has a data centre portfolio company, Edge Connects, and Vesely sits on its board. I sat down with him on the sidelines of a global summit. One question seemed an obvious place to start. How have data centres gone from a niche sector of infrastructure, or possibly real estate, but we'll get to that later, to one of the hottest investments in the world, seemingly in the blink of an eye?

**Jan Vesely** (3:55)
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's sudden. We've been investing in them for, I think, six plus seven years now. It's always been a high growth area in infrastructure. Cloud has been growing for a decade, basically for 20 plus percent, and is still growing 10 percent a year. So it's been always quite, or not always, but the past 10 years, a quite attractive sector. Now on top of that, you layer AI growth, which adds another 20 percent on an already very high base with demand right now outstripping supply quite significantly.
So it makes it quite an attractive growth infrastructure opportunity with good contracts, good customers and strong growth.

**James Lineker** (4:34)
Vesely is far from alone in noting that data centres are not some flash in the pan.

**Kathleen Lawler** (4:40)
AI has really supercharged and up-sized that demand for data centres. But it's the same players with hyperscalers, just bigger and bigger capital needs. I think the scale of the capital needs is what catches fire in people's imaginations.
And certainly an exciting opportunity for us as capital providers.