Meta, Microsoft lead US$850 billion boom in data centre leases

META Platforms and Microsoft each committed tens of billions of dollars in additional data centre leases in their most recent quarters, adding to the massive sums the industry is spending on artificial intelligence.

Those pledges helped push overall commitments to future data centre leases to more than US$850 billion among the largest cloud computing companies. These obligations have continued to climb over the last year as tech giants work to expand their fleet of server farms, according to a Bloomberg analysis of regulatory filings.

The future costs, which come on top of active leases, won’t appear on companies’ balance sheets until they begin making payments on them.

They’re generally tied to data centres, but can also include facilities such as offices or warehouses. Some leases contain clauses that let companies escape future obligations under certain conditions.

By far the biggest spender in the quarter was Meta. The social media giant added US$79 billion in new commitments — a 76 per cent increase over the prior period, bringing the total to US$182.9 billion as of March 31.

Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has said his company will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade.

Microsoft was the runner-up, adding more than US$41 billion in commitments to US$196.6 billion. The software giant continues to be held back by a lack of data centre capacity after taking a pause on its leasing activity through much of 2025. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a massive server farm project in west Texas in partnership with Chevron Corp.

Meta and Microsoft declined to comment.

By contrast, Oracle’s future-dated leases slightly declined from the prior quarter. But the company had already signed leases for many of the large sites needed for a massive contract with OpenAI, and it still leads in future spending commitments.

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Amazon.com added US$10 billion in lease commitments in the quarter, less than half the amount signed in the prior period. CoreWeave’s future commitments have largely been flat over the last two quarters.

The overall pool of US$850 billion in future lease commitments will largely be paid out over the next two decades, pointing to steady continued spending on data centre inputs such as semiconductors and energy. BLOOMBERG