The AI boom is triggering a global infrastructure race, and the stakes go well beyond better chips and faster software. Data centers, cloud platforms and networking systems all need to scale to keep up with increasingly demanding workloads, while the electricity required to run them is becoming a concerning constraint.
The International Energy Agency estimated that data centers used 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 — or about 1.5 percent of all global consumption — and anticipates that figure to more than double by 2030. That growing impact is putting companies across the infrastructure supply chain in the spotlight, from hyperscale cloud providers and semiconductor makers to the specialists keeping data centers powered and connected. Here are some important names to know.
Top Digital Infrastructure Companies
Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud
Equinix
Riot Platforms
Digital Infrastructure Companies to Know
Cisco routers carry roughly 80 percent of global internet traffic, making its hardware largely responsible for moving data worldwide. Ranked No. 1 by Gartner in worldwide enterprise network equipment, its switches, routers and security products help organizations connect data centers, cloud environments and offices while protecting traffic moving between them.
AWS controls a third of the global cloud infrastructure market, making it the sole largest computing provider behind modern business software and AI services. To sustain that footprint, its engineering teams are swapping off-the-shelf hardware for custom Graviton silicon processors and provisioning foundation-model pipelines via Amazon Bedrock.
Broadcom builds the networking silicon that keeps thousands of AI chips talking to each other without delays. Because shuttling data between processors is often what slows down large models, the company engineered its Tomahawk 6 switch to push 102.4 terabits per second on a single chip to better support high-density computing clusters.
Microsoft processes more than 160 trillion security signals daily. As one of the largest companies in the world, it secures products used by hundreds of millions of people every day, from Windows and Microsoft 365 to Azure and GitHub. Today, it’s built upwards of 500 data centers in more than 80 regions, which allows customers to deploy infrastructure closer to users and data.
Equinix operates carrier-neutral data centers that house physical “meet-me rooms,” allowing businesses to wire directly into cloud platforms, telecom carriers and trading networks instead of routing traffic over the public internet. This private interconnect model drastically cuts latency and bypasses web congestion across its 282 data centers worldwide, which collectively support more than 520,000 direct connections.
Riot Platforms began as a biotech company before pivoting to Bitcoin mining in 2017. Pivoting yet again, it’s now repurposed its power-intensive mining facilities to host the computing infrastructure that supports high-performance demand of the AI boom. In 2026, Riot Platforms secured agreements for 241 megawatts of critical IT capacity with AMD and a major AI lab.
Digital Realty’s wholesale and colocation data center campuses house and connect the physical systems behind their digital operations, from enterprise IT to hyperscale computing. Spanning more than 300 physical facilities, its campuses directly link these computing clusters to about 500 cloud providers through dedicated, low-latency private interconnects.
Nvidia defines much of modern AI infrastructure from the ground up. Since inventing the GPU in 1999, the tech giant has expanded from chipmaking into networking equipment and software that now trains and runs increasingly complex AI models. Its technology also powers 81 percent of the systems on the TOP500 list and some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Google Cloud brings the infrastructure behind Google’s search and AI systems to billions of users, from large-scale data processing through BigQuery to specialized tensor processing units for AI workloads. Its global network spans 43 regions and 130 zones, supported by 10 million kilometers of terrestrial and subsea fiber that help move data between users, services and computing facilities.
Schneider Electric builds the electrical distribution, backup power and cooling systems that data centers depend on to operate continuously. Through its EcoStruxure architecture and liquid cooling partnerships, the company’s end-to-end electrical switchgear and direct-to-chip heat dissipation are specifically designed to support high-density AI setups that draw more than 100 kilowatts per rack.
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