Feature · 10 November 2026

Data centres are racing ahead of the power to run them

Cloud groups keep raising their spending while grids struggle to keep pace, and Taiwan's power and cooling suppliers are booking more revenue.

Microsoft is spending heavily and still cannot build fast enough. "We still have demand that exceeds supply," chief financial officer Amy Hood told analysts on the company's latest earnings call. She added that "some third-party capacity deliveries we expected in Q1 were delayed", a reminder that ordering a data centre and switching one on are different things. ⁸

The cheques behind that demand are very large. Amazon said it still expects to spend $220 billion this year, while Alphabet kept its forecast at $195 billion to $205 billion. Alphabet's finance chief, Anat Ashkenazi, said: "We continue to expect our capex to increase significantly in 2027, and will provide further details on our Q4 call." The Motley Fool, adding up company reports, put the combined third-quarter capital spending of Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta at $208.7 billion, against $113.4 billion a year earlier. ¹⁰⁹¹²

That money is landing on very big sites. In Abu Dhabi, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, group chief executive of Mubadala, said the first 200 megawatts of Stargate UAE's 1-gigawatt campus was due to be ready in the third quarter of 2026, with more than 5,000 workers on site. In Japan, SoftBank said its Hokkaido Tomakomai AI data centre is planned to begin with 300 megawatts and could expand to 1 gigawatt. It said the site is progressing toward an opening by the end of the fiscal year. ¹³¹⁵

Power, not land or capital, is where the plans are starting to strain. Japan's grid coordinator, OCCTO, said it is increasingly hard to forecast demand because data centres keep postponing their start dates. It warned that the supply-demand balance "after fiscal year 2028 is expected to become severe with multiple areas exceeding the supply reliability criteria." The Transition Economics Institute, summarising the report, described a circular problem: developers wait for grid capacity, and generators wait for proof that the demand will arrive. ¹⁶

Taiwan's part in the chain begins with silicon and extends to the hardware around it. TSMC guided fourth-quarter revenue of $52.3 billion to $54.3 billion. SemiAnalysis analyst Sravan Kundojjala told CNBC: "Even after those checks, TSMC says demand remains well above its supply capacity." ¹²

The revenue of the power and cooling suppliers shows the same direction. Taipei Ledger tracks 5 such companies: Delta Electronics (2308), Asia Vital Components (3017), Auras (3324), Jentech (3653), Lite-On Technology (2301). Together they filed revenue of NT$123.3bn for October 2026, +32.5% on a year earlier and +10.9% on the month before, which makes it the highest month in our data. For January to October 2026 their combined revenue was NT$1.02tn, +40.0% on the same months of the previous year, against NT$904.2bn for all of 2025. Next on the calendar, Alphabet has promised details of its 2027 spending on its fourth-quarter call, and SoftBank is working toward the Tomakomai opening by the end of its fiscal year. ⁹¹⁵

Sources: 1. TSMC 2026 Q3 Quarterly Results - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited · 2. TSMC posts record profit for a sixth straight quarter, beating estimates on AI boom · 8. Microsoft (MSFT) Q1 earnings report 2027 (CNBC) · 9. Alphabet (GOOGL) earnings Q3 2026 (CNBC) · 10. Amazon posts negative free cash flow of $42.4 billion, holds 2026 capex unchanged (CNBC) · 12. How Much Are AI Companies Spending on Data Centers? (The Motley Fool) · 13. Stargate UAE's first phase to be completed in third quarter of 2026 | The National · 15. SoftBank Raises Outlook As Cloud And AI Revenue Jumps 37% - Dataconomy · 16. Japan's Data Centre Boom Is Arriving Later, and Into a Tighter Fuel Market · Transition Economics In