The data center became the center of gravity in global investment

The most important shift in last year's global investment map was not a country. It was a building type. Data centers pulled in more than $270 billion in announced FDI in 2025, over a fifth of all greenfield project value, and greenfield commitments to the sector rose by roughly $125 billion in a single year. No other category grew anything like as fast.

That capital is concentrated. France, the United States and the Republic of Korea led on host volume, with a second tier of major projects landing in Brazil, India, Thailand and Malaysia. For everyone else, the practical question is not 'how do we win a hyperscale campus' but 'what part of this wave can we realistically capture.'

The deeper change is what these projects reward. A data center is capital-heavy and job-light: the decisive factors are firm power availability, grid-connection timelines, water for cooling, and permitting speed. Several of 2025's largest projects moved on the promise of megawatts and a connection date, not headline incentives, and stalled where the grid could not deliver.

It is also increasingly an economic-statecraft question. AI infrastructure investment is now fused with industrial policy and national security: where compute gets sited, who owns it, and which chips run inside it are screened and steered by governments. Expect investment-promotion conversations to run straight into energy policy and security review.

And there is a distributional catch that should worry the field. The same boom is widening the global divide. Flows to developed economies jumped 43% in 2025 while developing economies slipped 2%, and three quarters of least-developed countries saw stagnant or falling inflows. The strategic, technology-driven capital is pooling where the grid, talent and policy certainty already are.