1Q26 IB: Executive Summary
The first quarter of the year was a busy one and carried forward trends already in motion throughout the past year. Revenue growth continued to accelerate, demand is outpacing supply across the ecosystem, and this has created backlogs for cloud providers as they continue to aggressively invest in CapEx to build capacity amid a constrained environment. AI is the primary driver of what is happening in the current environment, and the ongoing development of this technology personified in inferencing and usage deployment, is pushing demand to the next level. And the impact is being felt across the ecosystem. Hyperscale, neoclouds and webscale cloud providers are all seeing healthy demand and growth acceleration, and this is spinning off into demand for data centre colocation, interconnection and managed services. Somewhat overlooked is the fact that demand for AI is also spinning off and pushing up demand for traditional infrastructure services as hybrid environments are built and the migration of data and workloads to cloud-based and off-premise environments are gaining renewed urgency as organizations move to take advantage of AI. Meanwhile, the strategic landscape is evolving alongside the shifts in the market. Investor interest in the space remains high and strategic activity is increasingly oriented to acquiring the technology, resources and capabilities necessary to enable this next wave of growth. This report takes a close look at the noteworthy trends and developments from the recent 1Q26 period. A more detailed look at the M&A landscape, APAC region and hyperscale cloud sectors is available to clients in separate quarterly reports.
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