Social Graph VC: Data center capital expenditure will exceed 1 trillion USD in 2026

Venture capital firm Social Graph VC recently published an article on market entry stating that data center capital expenditures will exceed $1 trillion by 2026, approximately double the spending of the four major hyperscale cloud providers in 2025. Jensen Huang expects it to reach $3 to $4 trillion annually by the end of this decade, potentially hitting $10 trillion by 2031. AI investments account for about 0.9% of global GDP, rising to approximately 1.4% by 2028.

The article states that Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 each have training power consumption below 2GW, with costs around $120 billion. Each generation of models can recoup costs on their own, while laboratory losses stem from the next-generation models that are expanding training scales by 10 times. Computing cannot be procured at a single price; H100 rental rates are about $1.95/hour in the market, while hyperscale cloud rates are $8-9/hour, with hourly rates fluctuating by 137% over the year. There is a financing gap of $1.5 trillion within the approximately $3 trillion global data center expenditures expected by 2028.

The article also mentions that CME plans to launch cash-settled H100 and B200 monthly lease futures on NYMEX on October 5, 2026, pending regulatory review, with settlement referencing the Silicon Data Index; ICE has also announced GPU futures based on the Ornn Index.