The Third Gold Rush: Why AI Is the Biggest Infrastructure Boom of Our Lifetime
By Matt Salter, Head of Data Centres
Everyone is calling today’s data centre surge the “new gold rush.” Investment is reaching record highs, and every morning brings news of another acquisition, expansion, or strategic partnership landing in our inboxes. But for those of us who have spent decades in this industry, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the ground shift beneath our feet.
We’ve been here before. Twice.
And what we’re seeing now is bigger than both.
Gold Rush #1: The 1990s & The Birth of the Internet
In the 1990s, businesses made the great leap from analogue to digital. The world connected through the internet, and the foundations of today’s technology ecosystem were laid — cloud computing, social media, and smartphones all trace their roots back to this era.
The energy was undeniable. The IT market was booming. Traders celebrated with champagne over lunch. And if you owned a Krone tool, you were guaranteed work.
Between 1995 and 2000, global IT investment grew by 24% annually, reaching $2 trillion by the end of the decade. Without fully realising it, we were installing the backbone of the digital world — building infrastructure for a future that had yet to take shape.
Gold Rush #2: The Virtualisation Wave
Then came the next surge.
Around 2005, virtualisation transformed the industry again. Offices became digital. Workflows went paperless. Data volumes exploded — and suddenly we were re-cabling the world we had wired just a decade earlier.
Global IT spending once again surged past $2 trillion, and every major technology company decided they needed data centres.
By 2010, cloud providers entered the stage with greater scale and deeper pockets. Organisations began shutting down their own facilities and migrating to the cloud. While global IT spend climbed to $3 trillion, investment shifted decisively away from on-premise infrastructure toward hyperscale environments.
The industry changed — and so did we.
Through strong partnerships, strategic decisions, and a willingness to evolve, we positioned ourselves at the centre of this transformation, working inside the data centres of some of the largest cloud platforms on the planet.
Gold Rush #3: The AI Infrastructure Boom
Now fast-forward to today.
AI hasn’t arrived quietly — it has kicked the door off its hinges. Everywhere you look, organisations are racing to build the compute power needed to support it.
In 2025, AI-related IT spend is expected to reach $1.5 trillion, with total data centre investment exceeding $4 trillion. After more than 30 years in the industry, this doesn’t look like a trend — it looks like the next global infrastructure build-out.
And once again, Onnec is positioned at the centre of it.
Building What Comes Next
Technology never stands still. Agentic AI, intelligent retail and logistics platforms, and even quantum computing are already reshaping the questions our customers are asking.
What matters most is not predicting the future — it’s being ready to build it.
For over two decades, we’ve followed hyperscale growth wherever it leads, mastering complex environments, high-density fibre deployments, fast-track delivery models, and global scaling. That experience is our greatest advantage.
Today, we’re delivering infrastructure at a truly global scale:
- Supporting deployments of 10,000+ GPUs
- Installing miles of high-density fibre
- Delivering large-scale copper cabling solutions
- Providing managed services across more than 30 countries
- Scaling hundreds of engineers globally with repeatability at the core of our delivery model
- Meeting customers with “needed it yesterday” timelines
- Delivering proven hyperscale and GPU project success worldwide
And in my view, we’ve only just begun to see what AI will demand from our infrastructure.
Riding the latest Gold Rush
We are all riding the crest of this latest gold rush. But what sets Onnec apart is not simply our ability to respond — it’s our experience navigating every major infrastructure wave that came before.
We understand how transformation unfolds.
We know how to scale.
And we know how to build what the future requires.
Because if history has taught us anything, it’s this:
Every technological revolution depends on the infrastructure beneath it.
And the AI era will be no different.
