Source: Semianalysis
Traditional datacenter construction—requiring 3-5 years of planning, permitting, and building—is being replaced by modular, prefabricated designs that compress timelines to months and reduce capital risk. This shift favors cloud giants like hyperscalers who can absorb the upfront engineering costs and standardize designs across sites, while traditional colocation and enterprise data infrastructure providers lack the scale or R&D budgets to compete on speed and flexibility. The advantage isn't just faster builds; it's control—whoever owns the modular blueprint and supply chain for datacenter components owns the next decade of cloud expansion.