What are the latest funding trends in data centers?

All funding deals in the data center market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our data center market report.

Is data center funding actually down right now?

Data center funding looks down in dollars today, but the underlying market is busier than it was last year.

We counted 25 qualifying financings in the current year-to-date period, up from 18 over the same stretch of 2025 and 15 two years ago. The number of funded companies also increased from 18 to 23 year over year.

Yet those 25 deals brought in at least $11.16 billion, versus at least $21.24 billion last year. That 47.5% drop is real, but it says much more about the size of 2025's biggest deals than about how easy it is to find funding activity now.

Last year included an $8 billion T5 Data Centers transaction and more than $5 billion of new primary equity for Aligned Data Centers. Deals on that scale can completely change the headline for a market with fewer than 30 financings a year.

Meanwhile, today's median round is $100 million, down from $500 million last year. We are seeing more companies raise, more individual transactions and much smaller checks on a typical deal.

Calling that a 47% funding collapse would give the wrong picture. Data center investors are still deploying heavily; they are simply doing it across a different mix of companies and deal sizes.

Metric	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD	Change vs. 2025
Deals	25	18	15	+38.9%
Unique companies	23	18	13	+27.8%
Total capital	≥$11.16B	≥$21.24B	≥$14.53B	−47.5%
Median round	$100M	$500M	$254M	−80.0%
Average round	$446M	$1.25B	$969M	−64.3%
Largest round	>$2.0B	$8.0B	$6.4B	−75%+
Top-three capital share	52.9%	68.7%	76.4%	−15.8 pp
Funded companies	23	18	13	+27.8%

Does the data center funding decline disappear without the giant deals?

Pretty much. Once we remove the largest data center rounds, 2026 suddenly looks far stronger than 2025.

We calculated $143.6 million of capital from deals of $50 million or less, compared with just $40.5 million over the same period last year. That is a 254% increase.

Raise the threshold to $100 million and the result barely changes direction: $644.1 million this year versus $192.1 million last year, a 235% jump.

The concentration numbers tell the same story from another angle. Last year's largest transaction alone represented 37.7% of all capital. Two years ago, the largest one represented 44%. The current top deal contributes only 17.9%.

Even the top five have become less dominant. They account for about three quarters of current dollars, against more than four fifths last year and more than nine tenths in 2024.

Data center funding is still a concentrated infrastructure market, of course. Billion-dollar transactions remain common enough to distort almost every average. But today's headline decline comes mainly from fewer extreme outliers rather than a broad retreat by investors.

Are normal data center funding rounds getting smaller?

Yes. Typical data center funding rounds are much smaller these days, while the middle of the market has become noticeably busier.

The median financing fell 80% year over year. The average dropped from around $1.25 billion to $446 million.

At the same time, the number of $100 million-plus financings barely moved: there were 13 in both comparable periods. The big change happened underneath them.

Eight current deals sit between $20 million and $100 million, compared with only two over the same part of 2025. Aston Power raised $20 million. Claros raised $30 million. TAR initially raised $27 million. Cardinal Data Power closed roughly $70 million, while Wafr's financing was around $70.5 million.

That gives the market a financing layer that was much thinner last year.

The mix is especially interesting because these are not all conventional data-center developers. Many are building power delivery, cooling or other technology needed around the facilities themselves.

Claros is a good example of how quickly that layer can move. After raising its $30 million Seed round, the company announced in August that Navitas Semiconductor had agreed to acquire it. So the current wave around data-center power is already producing strategic transactions as well as venture rounds.

Deal size	2026 deals	2025 deals	2024 deals	2026 capital share
Under $5M	3	1	2	<0.1%
$5M–<$20M	1	1	2	<0.1%
$20M–<$50M	5	1	2	1.2%
$50M–<$100M	3	1	1	1.8%
$20M–<$100M combined	8	2	3	3.0%
$100M+	13	13	8	96.9%
Known-amount deals	25	17	15	100%

Is 2026 already unusually busy for data center funding?

Yes. By deal count, the current data center funding year has already matched each of the previous two full years.

We recorded 25 qualifying transactions across all of calendar 2024 and another 25 across calendar 2025. The current year reached that number before the final quarter.

Capital has followed a completely different path. Current funding equals only about 47% of the full-2025 total and 55% of full-2024 capital. Deal counts already match last year while capital does not, so we lay out how much money went in, quarter by quarter, in our data center market report.

We do not need to annualize anything to see the change. Funding markets are too lumpy for a straight-line year-end projection to be particularly credible anyway.

An entire normal year's volume of transactions has already happened with roughly half the capital required in either of the past two years.

That is the cleanest illustration of what has changed. Data center financing is happening more frequently now, while the giant equity checks that inflated previous totals are less dominant.

Why is so much data center funding going into power and cooling now?

Power and cooling has become the clearest growth area in data center funding because access to electricity and thermal capacity are now limiting how quickly AI infrastructure can actually be built.

We counted 12 power-and-cooling financings in the current period, up from five last year. The category now represents 48% of all transactions.

The companies cover several pieces of the same physical problem. Aston Power is building integrated private power networks. Claros focused on chip-to-grid power delivery. TAR is developing modular behind-the-meter generation and storage. ZutaCore raised $100 million for direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Wafr works on thermal storage and cooling. AVK secured more than $1 billion to expand on-site power infrastructure.

External evidence increasingly lines up with what we are seeing in the funding activity.

The International Energy Agency reported in its 2026 energy-and-AI update that global data-center electricity demand grew 17% in 2025, while consumption from AI-focused facilities rose much faster. The IEA also highlighted tighter supplies of transformers, gas turbines and other energy equipment, alongside delays around grid connections and approvals.

J.P. Morgan's latest infrastructure analysis estimates that the five biggest U.S. hyperscalers will spend around $697 billion in capex during 2026. Its analysts point to power availability, equipment supply chains and permitting as major constraints on new capacity.

The companies raising money currently sit directly in front of those bottlenecks. Investors are paying much more attention to the plumbing of AI infrastructure because having GPUs is of limited use when a new campus cannot get enough power or remove enough heat.

Is the power-and-cooling funding boom just one huge deal?

No. Data center power and cooling is growing mainly through deal breadth rather than one transaction inflating the total.

AVK alone raised more than $1 billion, so the category could easily look more concentrated than it really is.

Power and cooling accounts for almost half of current deal volume but only 13.1% of capital. Its median financing is just $28.5 million, far below the $100 million market median.

That is a very different pattern from hyperscale operators, where a small number of huge financings carry most of the weight.

We see power activity at several stages too. Claros raised at Seed, Aston Power at Series A, TAR moved from Seed to Series A within the year, and ZutaCore completed a $100 million Series C.

Strategic money has followed the same theme. TDK Ventures and JLL Spark backed Aston Power. Mitsubishi Electric, Carrier Ventures and Samsung participated in ZutaCore. Johnson Controls and Legrand were involved in Accelsius.

AVK's own announcement gives a good sense of why investors are showing up. The company said its more than $1 billion investment would help fund, own and operate on-site power for data-center customers, with a pipeline above 2 GW. It explicitly described "speed to power" as one of the industry's key requirements.

So the current power-and-cooling wave goes well beyond one outlier. A fairly wide financing market is forming around the infrastructure problems created by higher-density computing.

Are traditional data center developers getting squeezed?

Data center developers are getting a smaller share of funding activity than last year, mainly because 2025 was exceptionally heavy on huge developer financings.

Developer deal count dropped from seven to five, while their share of transactions fell from 38.9% to 20%. Developers falling from 38.9% to 20% of transactions reshuffles the field, and we size up who is ahead and who is falling behind in our data centers market report.

The dollar move was much bigger. Developers captured almost 79% of capital last year and about 37% currently.

T5 explains part of that gap on its own. The company and QuadReal described their 2025 transaction as an additional $8 billion equity investment into the platform. Aligned Data Centers also completed a capital package containing more than $5 billion of new primary equity.

Current developer deals are smaller and more varied. Starcloud raised $170 million. Cardinal Data Power raised approximately $70 million. StratGrid raised $1.75 million.

Developer financing therefore looks cooler compared with an extraordinary 2025 base, but developers have hardly disappeared from the capital market. More of today's incremental activity simply sits elsewhere, especially around power infrastructure.

Are early-stage data center startups getting funded again?

Yes. Early-stage data center funding has recovered sharply from last year's unusually mature market.

Seed and Series A together account for 40% of current deals, compared with only 16.7% during the same period of 2025.

Five Seed and five Series A financings made our current dataset. Claros' $30 million Seed, TAR's $27 million Seed, Aston Power's $20 million Series A and Cardinal Data Power's roughly $70 million Series A are part of that group.

But 2024 prevents us from calling this a completely new shift. Early-stage rounds represented 46.7% of transactions two years ago, slightly more than today.

The better reading is that 2025 was unusually skewed toward mature platforms and growth equity. Early-stage activity has now come back toward a more normal share of the market.

Dollars still lean heavily toward mature businesses. Growth equity represents only 24% of current transactions but absorbs almost 65% of capital. When infrastructure platforms raise, the checks remain enormous.

Stage	2026 deals	2026 deal share	2026 capital share	Median round
Seed	5	20.0%	0.6%	$5.9M
Series A	5	20.0%	3.9%	$70M
Series B	4	16.0%	2.3%	$65M
Series C	2	8.0%	18.8%	$1.05B
Growth Equity	6	24.0%	64.7%	$1.25B
Unknown	3	12.0%	9.6%	-
Early stage: Seed + A	10	40.0%	4.5%	-

Are new data center companies getting funded, or are investors backing familiar names?

Most of the extra data center deals currently come from follow-on rounds, so existing funded companies are benefiting more than completely new entrants.

We identified 20 follow-on financings, versus 13 last year. First financings stayed flat at five.

That means the seven additional deals we see year over year did not come with a similar increase in companies entering the funding market for the first time.

The share of first financings consequently fell to 20%, from 27.8% last year and 40% two years ago.

The median first financing has changed even more, dropping to $27 million from $500 million in the previous comparable period. AVK is the obvious unusual case: its billion-dollar-plus investment was technically the first external financing in a business with decades of operating history.

We should read these numbers directionally because determining whether something is truly a company's first financing requires reconstructing previous capital activity from public records. Still, the pattern is strong enough to be useful.

Funding activity is broadening across transactions faster than the population of newly funded companies. Investors seem comfortable continuing to finance businesses they already know, especially once those companies sit in parts of the infrastructure stack that are becoming critical.

Financing history	2026	2025	2024
First financings	5	5	6
First-financing share	20.0%	27.8%	40.0%
Follow-ons	20	13	8
Follow-on share	80.0%	72.2%	53.3%
Capital in first financings	≥$1.10B	≥$3.01B	≥$2.21B
Capital in follow-ons	≥$10.05B	≥$18.24B	≥$12.07B
Median first financing	$27M	$500M	$160M
Median follow-on	$100M	$482.5M	$467.5M

Why are corporate investors showing up more often in data center deals?

Corporate investors are getting much more involved in data center funding because the technologies being financed increasingly overlap with their own power, cooling, semiconductor and infrastructure businesses.

We found strategic investors in nine current deals, equal to 36% of transactions. Last year's comparable figure was only two deals.

ZutaCore's Series C included Mitsubishi Electric, Carrier Ventures and Samsung. Aston Power attracted TDK Ventures and JLL Spark. Accelsius' Series B brought together Johnson Controls and Legrand. Starcloud received strategic participation from Monolithic Power Systems. With Mitsubishi Electric, Samsung and other corporates in the rounds, we look at which investors are making the biggest bets in our report on data centers.

These companies have practical reasons to care about what happens inside the data-center stack. Carrier and Johnson Controls sell thermal infrastructure. TDK and Monolithic Power Systems have direct exposure to power electronics. JLL works with large infrastructure and real-estate projects.

Accelsius shows how these relationships can go beyond a purely financial bet. Its Series B announcement said the company was expanding two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling for high-density AI facilities, with Johnson Controls leading and Legrand joining strategically.

The median strategic round has actually become smaller, from $325 million last year to $100 million currently. Corporate participation is becoming more frequent, rather than simply being pushed up by larger checks.

Are the same big investors dominating data center funding?

No. The disclosed lead-investor pool is much more fragmented today.

We could establish lead or co-lead investors for 17 of the 25 current transactions. Those deals involve 28 different disclosed lead or co-lead names, with nobody appearing more than once.

Two years ago, DigitalBridge and Silver Lake each appeared multiple times in our comparable sample. Last year's lead group included names such as Macquarie Asset Management, Stonepeak, TJC and vehicles linked to GIC and ADIA.

Their absence from the current lead list does not mean they stopped investing in data centers. These firms can invest through debt, joint ventures, secondary transactions or deals outside the exact scope of our equity dataset.

Current lead activity is nevertheless spread across a wider set of investors.

That lines up with the broader market shape: more transactions, more categories attracting checks and many companies raising in the tens of millions rather than a few platforms absorbing most of the capital.

Is data center funding moving away from North America?

Data center capital is much less concentrated in North America today, although North America still produces the largest number of deals.

We counted 13 North American transactions, equal to 52% of the current total.

Its share of dollars, however, fell from 85.2% last year to 41%. APAC now accounts for 32.5% of capital and Europe for 26.5%.

APAC's change is particularly revealing because its deal share barely moved. Large financings are doing the work.

CtrlS, for example, announced an investment of INR 40 billion for an 8.2% company stake as part of its wider partnership with CPP Investments. Nxtra also announced $1 billion of new investment led by Alpha Wave Global and Carlyle alongside Bharti Airtel.

Europe gained both deal share and capital share, although AVK's more than $1 billion investment contributes heavily to the dollar figure.

So the geographic shift is real, but it does not mean North America has suddenly stopped attracting data-center investment. The enormous dollar dominance it had last year has simply eased as large transactions appear elsewhere.

Is data center funding getting less concentrated overall?

Yes. Data center capital is still top-heavy, but funding is less concentrated today than it was in either of the previous comparable periods.

The top five current deals account for 75.3% of all capital. That is still concentrated, especially compared with normal software venture markets.

Two years ago, though, the top five represented 91.2%.

The change is visible outside deal concentration too. No category now controls nearly four fifths of capital the way developers did last year. North America no longer accounts for more than 85% of funding dollars. We also see no repeat disclosed lead investor among current deals.

At the company level, 23 different businesses have raised this year, versus 18 over the same part of last year.

The strongest expansion sits below the very largest rounds. That gives the market more depth even though multi-billion-dollar financings still dominate the money.

Data center funding remains concentrated because building physical infrastructure requires enormous amounts of capital. But the current market is less dependent on a handful of transactions to generate activity.

Is AI really what's driving the change in data center funding?

AI looks like a major driver of today's data center funding shift, especially around power and cooling, although the funding data alone cannot tell us that every deal happened because of AI.

The outside evidence is unusually consistent with the companies raising money.

The IEA says electricity consumption at AI-focused data centers jumped 50% in 2025. It also expects total data-center electricity consumption to double by 2030 and identifies grid connections, energy equipment and planning systems as near-term bottlenecks. With grid connections and energy equipment named as near-term bottlenecks, we go through the biggest unsolved problems in our report on data centers.

J.P. Morgan's 2026 work reaches a similar conclusion from the financing side. It sees hyperscaler capex reaching roughly $697 billion this year while warning that power availability and equipment lead times can delay new projects.

Then we can look at the companies themselves. Aston Power says its approximately 2 GW pipeline includes data-center projects across several U.S. states. AVK says access to power has become a defining constraint for AI infrastructure. ZutaCore is scaling direct-to-chip cooling specifically around AI and high-performance computing deployments.

The funding rotation lines up closely with what the industry says it is struggling to build.

We should still keep the causality precise. Our deal data shows a sharp move toward companies solving power and cooling problems. The IEA, J.P. Morgan and company announcements help explain why those problems have become urgent. Together, they make AI-driven infrastructure pressure the most convincing explanation we found for the current change.

What is actually changing in data center funding right now?

Data center funding is becoming busier, broader and more focused on infrastructure bottlenecks, while the enormous platform deals that dominated previous totals are playing a smaller role.

The strongest change is transaction activity. The current market has already produced a full prior year's worth of deals, even though aggregate capital remains well below the previous annual totals.

Megadeals explain most of the apparent weakness. Below the biggest checks, funding has increased sharply and the $20 million to $100 million layer is much more active than it was last year.

Investor attention has also moved decisively toward power and cooling. Those companies now make up almost half of current transactions, with funding spread across generation, grid access, electrical delivery, thermal management and liquid cooling.

Earlier-stage companies are participating again after a particularly growth-heavy 2025. At the same time, most incremental transactions are still follow-ons, which tells us investors are giving plenty of capital to companies already inside the ecosystem rather than creating an equally large wave of newly funded entrants.

Strategic investors are also much more visible. Industrial companies with exposure to HVAC, power electronics, semiconductors and real estate are increasingly putting their own money behind the technologies needed to build the next generation of data centers.

The geographic trend deserves more caution. APAC and Europe have clearly taken a larger share of current dollars, but a few big deals can still move regional percentages very quickly.

As of now, the clearest description of the market is straightforward: data center funding has moved away from an unusually megadeal-heavy 2025 and toward a higher volume of smaller transactions, with power and cooling emerging as the most obvious new center of activity.