Morgan Stanley: data centers must break ground by October to open before end of 2027

Money is no longer the limiting factor in the AI infrastructure race. Time is. Morgan Stanley is warning that any data center project targeting operational status before the end of 2027 needs to begin construction by October. Given that groundbreaking-to-operational timelines now run two to three years at minimum, that October deadline is not a suggestion. It is a hard ceiling. The bottleneck is no longer the budget Hyperscalers are spending at a scale that would have seemed implausible five years ago. Capital expenditures across Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet are forecast to reach roughly $785 billion in 2026, with projections approaching $1 trillion in 2027. That capital is running headlong into a wall built from permitting delays, community opposition, and grid interconnection queues that stretch five to seven years in some regions. More than 300 local moratoriums on new data center construction have been enacted across the United States since 2023. Bernstein estimates that 35 to 40 percent of globally announced data center capacity faces meaningful risk of delay or outright cancellation through 2027. A separate JPMorgan analysis found that over 60 percent of planned 2027 capac...