Data Center 50: The Hottest Data Center Companies Of 2025
Overall data center spending enjoyed record growth last year leaping 34 percent, with market leaders like Nvidia, Dell, and HPE benefiting. This year has shown no let-up in demand with more than a half-trillion dollars in investment was pledged in January 2025.
To the moon!
That is not just an expression that describes the financial direction of the data center market. It is the literal location that one of the 2025 Data Center 50 awardees is working to place workloads as Flexential inked a deal that would rocket parts to the lunar surface to deploy the first extraterrestrial data center.
Flexential is not alone in its high-reaching aspirations as market analyst Synergy Research Group reported that data center spending enjoyed record growth last year, leaping 34 percent over the previous year, with market leaders like Nvidia, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Supermicro emerging as beneficiaries.
The data center spend seems to be accelerating even in an uncertain trade environment that includes the threat of tariffs, said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director of Synergy Research Group.
“As far as data centers and cloud services are concerned, in the short term at least I think it’s difficult to imagine too much damage,” Dinsdale told CRN. “Data centers will keep on doing what they are supposed to do, and committed construction plans and supply contracts will continue to progress. Data centers have been viewed as a safe haven for investments and in a general sense that is unlikely to change, but there could be all sorts of road bumps that have to be navigated.”
One of the thornier issue faced by the data center is around electricity generation, which power-hungry GPUs use in much greater quantities as they train and inference AI models for the enterprise.
Wes Cummins, CEO of data center provider Applied Digital, told CRN the company has turned to renewables, reclaimed power from factories and innovative cooling solutions to reduce the heat used and make the performance more efficient.
The ink had no sooner dried on 2024 when in came January with more than a half-trillion dollars in data center spending announced to build the AI compute needed for the most advanced compute and drive down costs.
In addition to the hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Meta, which annually invest about $250 billion in the data center, according to Synergy data, there is a massive $500 million investment coming from OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, which has been pooled to build out Stargate, an AI data center in Texas, with $100 million set to be spent this year.
Here are CRN’s hottest data center companies in 2025.
Accelsius
Josh Claman, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Accelsius is tackling one of the biggest data center challenges with its cooling technology by focusing on creating reliable and innovative heat management products such as NeuCool racks, which support 100 kilowatts of compute. The NeuCool 4-Way GPU Configuration is direct to chip liquid cooling for “the most advances CPU and GPU server configurations,” the company said.
Aligned Data Center
Andrew Schaap, CEO
Headquarters: Plano, Texas
Aligned Data Center is meeting the market’s massive appetite for capacity with its ExpandOnDemand capabilities that allow customers to scale up to the necessary compute across its data centers in North America and South America. In January Schaap revealed that the company raised $12 billion in funding with $5 billion in equity and $7 billion in debt commitments.
Amazon Web Services
Matt Garman, CEO
Headquarters: Seattle
AWS pledged to spend billions this year as it continues to build out data center capacity around the globe, including an $11 billion project in Georgia aimed at creating AI compute as well as $8.3 billion spent to create more cloud infrastructure in India. The company has been building data centers since 2006, focusing on serving highly regulated industries and featuring secure-by-design plans at every layer.
AMD
Lisa Su, Chair, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
AMD is powering the next generation of data centers with some of the most advanced GPUs on the market, leading some cloud service providers to build-out AMD-only server farms, according to one solution provider. The company’s data center portfolio includes its 5th Generation AMD EPYC processors as well as networking products.
American Tower
Steven Vondran, President, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
The wireless- and broadband-focused vendor began construction of its first Aggregation Edge Data Center in Raleigh, N.C., last year. With crews now standing up the prefabricated data center modules, the facility is due to open early this year. It is designed to deliver low latency and high throughput to support uses such as hybrid cloud deployments, high- performance compute and AI inferencing.
Applied Digital
Wes Cummins, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Dallas
Catering to the needs of hyperscale customers and angled toward large deployments of GPUs, Cummins has been innovating the company’s data centers around “waterless” liquid cooling, which uses the local climate and evaporative technology to remove heat from data center compute while using substantially less water. Applied Digital just won a $5 billion investment and it is completing stage one of its Ellendale facility.
Artista Networks
Jayshree Ullal, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Whether it is the company’s device catalog of high-performance routers, its distributed ether link switches or the Arista EOS Network operating system that ties all of its hardware together, Arista Networks has some of the most sought-after products in the data center. Founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, Ken Duda and David Cheriton in 2008, the company is a recognized leader in networking innovation worldwide.
Broadcom
Hock Tan, President, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Broadcom’s array of chips are quickly rising in value among Wall Street analysts who see the company as a supplier of AI compute demand to the enterprise. The company is relentlessly focused on meeting the needs of those top enterprise customers as well as integrating VMware along with its mainframe and security offerings.
Cato Networks
Shlomo Kramer, CEO
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
Cato’s cloud data centers offer enterprises cost savings, scalability and agility. It simplifies the optimization, security and monitoring and allows enterprise customers to focus on deployment of their workloads. The company recently announced the appointment of Karl Soderlund as global channel chief. Soderlund has a 30 year history in cybersecurity and networking at companies such as Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks.
Cisco Systems
Chuck Robbins, Chair, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Cisco has made significant investments in its data center networking products in the last year, which are geared to meet the needs of AI. It includes the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches, Cisco 8000 Series routers and the Cisco Silicon One operating systems. Cisco said it offers superior scalability and streamlined operations that increase an organization’s flexibility and interoperability inside the data center.
Cloud Software Group
Tom Krause, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
The parent company of virtual application and desktop platform Citrix, Cloud Software Group signed an eight-year strategic partnership with Microsoft in April to strengthen its go-to-market and support the development of new cloud and AI solutions. Citrix said it has the preferred Microsoft Global Azure Partner solution for Enterprise Desktop as a Service when collaborating with joint Azure customers.
Cologix
Laura Ortman, CEO
Headquarters: Denver
Cologix—a network-neutral interconnection and hyperscale edge data center provider with 40 hubs across 12 North American markets —recently unveiled plans to spend more than $7 billion to support AI-ready digital infrastructure. That includes a 154-acre, 800-megawatt facility in Johnstown, Ohio, which will begin its first phase of construction this year.
CyrusOne
Eric Schwartz, CEO
Headquarters: Dallas
With dozens of facilities around the world, Cyrus One is a leader in global data center development. The company unveiled the groundbreaking of a 40-megawatt, 446,000- square-foot facility in in Aurora, Ill., last year and it has pledged $1 billion to expand its portfolio there as it modernizes data centers to prepare for AI deployments.
Michael Dell, Founder, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Round Rock, Texas
The computer maker is leaning in to AI with its Dell AI Factory, which can deliver rack-scale systems with enough compute to train and inference the most complex AI workloads, all in a turnkey product that is ready to work as soon as it is delivered. The company introduced a liquid-cooled version of the PowerEdge 9680 server, which powers its AI Factory to reduce the heat generated and make cooling the products easier.
Digital Realty
Andrew Power, President, CEO
Headquarters: Dallas
Digital Realty reached an energy milestone late last year with 11 of its Illinois data centers matched with 100 percent clean energy. It also signed a community agreement in Illinois for a share of three solar projects that offer a combined 19.8 megawatts of power. A leading provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data centers, colocation and interconnection solutions, Digital Realty has a global capacity of 300 facilities in 50 cities across six continents.
Eaton
Craig Arnold, President, CEO
Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland
Eaton’s battery and backup products are designed to meet the high-performance needs of data center compute while remaining cost-effective. Eaton said its no-nonsense portfolio does not compromise on uptime or security. The company said with data center compute expected to demand four-times the power by 2030, it has developed Brightlayer Data Center software. which allows users to integrate renewables and make better energy decisions.
EdgeConneX
Randy Brouckman, CEO
Headquarters: Herndon, Va.
EdgeConneX specializes in building sustainable hyperscale data centers for cloud customers and designing facilities to meet the growing needs of AI. The company has more than 80 data centers in 20 countries, including 32 in the Americas, 27 in EMEA and 16 in Asia-Pacific.
Equinix
Adaire Fox-Martin, President, CEO
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Equinix is one of the largest providers of data center space in the world with 10,000 customers and more than 310 of the Fortune 500 trusting its facilities with their information. The company unveiled a partnership with Dell in December that provides customers with Dell servers and storage along with Nvidia chips and Ethernet to deliver accelerated computing in any of its 260 AI-ready data centers.
Extreme Networks
Edward Meyercord, CEO
Headquarters: Morrisville, N.C.
Extreme Networks, a leader in cloud networking, has proven itself as one of the industry’s leading providers of data center networking gear, including switches, routers, Wi-Fi, network management, SD-WAN and network security products to its customer base of more than 50,000.
Flexential
Chris Downie, CEO
Headquarters: Charlotte, N.C.
The company has 40 data centers in 19 markets around the world, and it has plans to help get the first extraterrestrial facility off the ground. In January, Flexential said it is backing Lonestar Data Holdings’ plans to establish the first-ever, solar-powered, environmentally cooled data center on the Earth’s moon. Flexential said there is business potential in developing space-based data center solutions.
Google Cloud
Thomas Kurian, CEO
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
One of the largest hyperscalers on the planet, Google operates data centers around the world, providing high-performing, secure and reliable infrastructure with a focus on sustainability. Google has 18 facilities in the U.S., 10 in Europe and three in Asia providing around-the-clock coverage for customers.
H5 Data Centers
Josh Simms, CEO
Headquarters: Denver
H5 Data Center shas 27 facilities in 22 markets, managing 4 million square feet of data center space. The company said it engineers flexible, scalable solutions to meet core infrastructure and edge requirements for its customers, including needs around AI and backup and recovery.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Antonio Neri, President, CEO
Headquarters: Spring, Texas
With its servers and advanced HPE Aruba Networking products, HPE delivers secure data centers built for the most sophisticated workloads. For next-generation data centers, the HPE Private Cloud AI is a turnkey compute deployment that leverages HPE servers and storage with Nvidia GPUs managed through HPE’s GreenLake cloud.
Hitachi Vantara
Sheila Rohra, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Hitachi Vantara uses its expertise in storage, infrastructure and hybrid cloud to reduce the data center’s environmental footprint while keeping reliability top of mind. The company uses in-house analysis to reduce CO2 emissions and remodels existing facilities in order to minimize environmental impact. For BMW, Hitachi Vantara migrated and modernized 12 data center sites in eight countries without disruption. The move resulted in a 70 percent smaller footprint and 80 percent less power consumption.
IBM
Arvind Krishna, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Armonk, N.Y.
The company’s cloud data centers offer a resilient network of locations for complex cloud workloads around the globe with bare-metal servers in Canada, the U.S. and Brazil. Big Blue also offers services like IBM Cloud Object storage, which can be deployed in a single data center or across several locations.
Iceotope
Jonathan Ballon, CEO
Headquarters: Sheffield, U.K.
The company’s cooling technology is designed to overcome one of biggest issues facing the data center: heat. With 52 patens and 90 others in the pipeline, it offers an innovative, scalable, practical approach to cooling the dense, power-hungry GPU processors used to run AI workloads.
Intel
David Zinser and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Interim Co-CEOs
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Intel’s data center chips are deployed from the edge to the cloud with its Xeon processors boosting performance across a wide set of workloads. Meanwhile, the company’s Gaudi AI Accelerators are used to train and deploy GenAI at scale using high performance, high efficiency and deep learning. Intel also offers Ethernet technology to optimize workloads and interoperability.
Iron Mountain
William Meaney, President, CEO
Headquarters: Portsmouth, N.H.
Iron Mountain has expanded beyond its roots in records and information management to become a leading provider of data center and colocation services, along with services for asset life-cycle management and a range of digital offerings including data management and document processing.
JetCool, a Flex company
Bernie Malouin, CEO
Headquarters: Littleton, Mass.
JetCool delivers liquid cooling products that can be used to build out data centers for hyperscale, enterprise or colocation customers. The company just debuted a Coolant Distribution Unit that provides cooling for racks up to 300 kilowatts in size and can be scaled to cool 2 megawatts of capacity. The company was purchased by Austin, Texas-based Flex in November.
Juniper Networks
Rami Rahim, CEO
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, Calif.
Juniper Networks develops IT networking systems including switches and routers, network management software, network security products and software-defined networking technology. The company also offers a range of Software-as-a-Service, Network-as-a-Service and cloud service products–, the latter including the Juniper Mist network observability service.
Lenovo
Yuanqing Yang, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Beijing, China; Morrisville, N.C.
While Lenovo may be best known for its PCs, the company is one of the largest providers of data center hardware and services globally including its newest line of Neptune liquid- cooled servers. The devices, which made their debut at Lenovo Tech World in late 2024, can remove 99 percent of the heat from the server, improving performance as well as reducing power consumption by 30 percent.
LogicMonitor
Christina Kosmowski, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.
LogicMonitor provides a cloud-based platform called LM Envision for monitoring hybrid IT infrastructure. It recently unveiled a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to use the information Logic Monitor has collected for more than a decade in data center monitoring to create LLMs that are purpose-built for IT operations. LogicMonitor said the result will give teams smarter, more actionable insight as well as unmatched scalability.
Lumen Technologies
Kate Johnson, President, CEO
Headquarters: Monroe, La.
Lumen has a range of dedicated hosting, cloud services and managed services through its dozens of regional data centers, including business continuity and disaster recovery, application management and support. The company sees growing customer demand for its SASE cybersecurity services. In October the company unveiled a partnership with Meta to increase its network capacity and drive its AI goals.
Microsoft
Satya Nadella, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: Redmond, Wash.
Microsoft is a leader in building the modern data center, having committed $80 billion in January to constructing new campuses focused on delivering AI throughout the year. While the company said half of the money will be spent domestically, Microsoft’s goal is to invest at least $35 billion in data center infrastructure across 14 countries in three years.
NetApp
George Kurian, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Storage giant NetApp is an intelligent data center infrastructure company that uses unified data storage, integrated data services and CloudOps products to simplify hybrid environments. NetApp says it is the only enterprise-grade storage service embedded into the world’s largest public clouds.
NTT Global Data Centers
Abhijit Dubey, CEO
Headquarters: Sacramento, Calif.
NTT has colocation products, data center services and carrier-neutral connectivity offerings for customers that need high-availability secure connections. One of the largest providers of data center racks in the world, NTT can deliver 1,500 megawatts of capacity to customers from its sites in 20 countries around the world.
Nutanix
Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Nutanix is a leader in hyperconverged infrastructure, a combination of servers and storage incorporated into a distributed platform that does away with the need for legacy architecture.
Nvidia
Jensen Huang, President, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Nvidia expanded partnerships with the biggest corporations in the world last year as its chips are deployed to deliver the most technologically advanced compute in the world. Nvidia’s DGX platform is built specifically to meet the demands of AI deployed at the enterprise level.
Oracle
Safra Catz, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
One of the world’s largest hyperscalers, Oracle is also at the center of a massive $500 billion data center project called Stargate, which is backed by OpenAI and Softbank. The partners plan to spend $100 billion of the cash on a Texas facility build-out this year. Oracle has 64 cloud regions live plus 44 public cloud regions worldwide and another six being built.
Pure Storage
Charles Giancarlo, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Pure Storage accelerates AI pipelines with consistent predictable performance, fast data handling and 85 percent energy savings. The company’s future-proof, all- flash storage platform supports AI and machine learning to protect customers’ investment in GPUs.
Quantum
Jamie Lerner, Chairman, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
The provider of end-to-end data management introduced a new approach to building AI infrastructure using its Quantum Myriad all-flash file system, which fully supports Nvidia GPUDirect Storage capability. It offers “on-the-fly” client node deployments with cross- platform compatibility. This new capability also works with Nvidia Grace Hopper with Grace ARM-based architectures.
Scale Computing
Jeff Ready, Co-Founder, CEO
Headquarters: Indianapolis
One of the industries leaders in hyperconverged infrastructure and edge computing, Scale Computing enjoyed record growth last year as it doubled new customers and saw its software revenue increase 45 percent year over year.
Schneider Electric
Olivier Blum, CEO
Headquarters: Rueil-Malmaison, France
Schneider Electric—a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation—has reinvented itself for the modern AI landscape with a data center reference design it co-developed with Nvidia to support liquid-cooled, high-density chip clusters of up to 132 kilowatts per rack. The plans address the challenges faced by hyperscale customers inside colocation and enterprise data center environments.
Stack Infrastructure
Brian Cox, CEO, Americas
Headquarters: Denver
Stack Infrastructure powered up the new year by unveiling a 1-gigawatt data center in Stafford County, Va., which is the company’s largest development to date. The campus is on 500 acres, has four sub-campus locations and will draw committed power from six, 300-megawatt substations provided by Dominion Energy.
Supermicro
Charles Liang, President, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Supermicro is ramping its production of rack-scale deployments of Nvidia Blackwell rack-scale solutions, which leverage the HGX B200 chip in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations. The company said it is part of its Building Blocks Solution portfolio, an end- to-end AI data center. Supermicro's Nvidia HGX B200 8-GPU systems enables eight systems, comprising 64 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in a 42U rack and all the way up to 12 systems with 96 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs in a 52U rack.
TierPoint
Jerry Kent, CEO
Headquarters: St. Louis
TierPoint has one of the largest and most geographically diverse data center footprints in the U.S., with cloud-ready architecture ready in 20 markets coast to coast. Last year the company doubled down on partnerships, reaching advanced tier status with Amazon Web Services and earning the highest-rated Pinnacle Tier of VMware’s Cloud Services business. The company also invested in transforming downtown St. Louis office space into 22,600 square feet of data center.
Vantage Data Centers
Sureel Choksi, President, CEO
Headquarters: Denver
Vantage Data Centers said last year it secured a total of $13 billion in financing to meet a surge in demand for cloud computing and AI. The cash was used to support its expansion in key markets through strategic partnerships, sustainable innovation and operational excellence. The company opened new campuses in New Albany, Ohio, and Dubin, Ireland, and broke ground on six more facilities including locations in Northern Virginia, Switzerland, Malaysia and Japan.
VAST Data
Renen Hallak, Founder, CEO
Headquarters: New York
VAST Data Platform takes a customer’s unstructured data and transforms it to allow systems to think, react and discover. VAST enables AI adoption by rearchitecting how data is managed within its platform. In January the company unveiled a strategic partnership with Hypertec Cloud to increase domestic compute capacity across North America.
Vertiv
Giordano Albertazzi, CEO
Headquarters: Westerville, Ohio
Vertiv offers power, cooling and IT infrastructure products to help customers overcome the common bottlenecks that throttle growth in data centers and communications networks. The company does business in more than 130 countries around the world. Its hardware, software and analytics tools keep customers running continuously.
ZutaCore
Erez Freibach, Co-Founder, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
The company’s direct to chip liquid cooling technology is addressing a massive bottleneck in the data center around power and the heat it generates. ZutaCore uses its own chemical mixture to lower the boiling point of its cooling liquid so the heat generated by a chip is carried off as vapor while the chip itself remains bathed in a consistent water temperature.
