Hyperscalers Amazon and Microsoft are starting to return to leasing at scale, after a purported slowdown earlier this year, analysts at TD Cowen claim.

The financial services firm said in March that Microsoft had canceled up to 2GW of data center projects, partially due to stepping back from being OpenAI's exclusive compute provider.

At the time, Microsoft downplayed the pullback, and said that it still planned to spend around $80 billion on data center capex this year. "Any significant new endeavor at this size and scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our customers," Microsoft's president of cloud operations said at the time.

"What this means is that we are slowing or pausing some early-stage projects. While we may strategically pace our plans, we will continue to grow strongly and allocate investments that stay aligned with business priorities and customer demand."

The next month, analysts at Wells Fargo said that Amazon Web Services had delayed some data center leases, which the company similarly said was not the sign of a broader shift but just the rationalization of some costs.

Now, in its latest report, analysts at TD Cowen said that the cloud providers were starting to increase spend once again.

Some of the 2GW capacity was not canceled, but just pushed back by two years, the analysts said. As for now, "our checks indicated the potential for Microsoft to return to more meaningful activity following the end of its fiscal year in June, which could ultimately translate into an increase in data center leasing in Q4 2025."

That said, TD Cowen noted that dramatic job cuts - including in the data center procurement team - "our checks indicated the potential for Microsoft to return to more meaningful activity following the end of its fiscal year in June, which could ultimately translate into an increase in data center leasing in 4Q25."

The return seems more apparent for rival Amazon, with TD Cowen noting that the company may have won an unnamed 1GW+ customer "for which it would need to procure capacity quickly." However, executives at the company have still expressed dissatisfaction with colocation costs and a preference for self-builds.

Google, meanwhile, continues to spend heavily as it looks to catch up. TD Cowen believes that in Q1 this year the search and cloud giant spent the most on colocation deals in its history, alongside a GPU-as-a-Service deal with CoreWeave.

Similar to AWS, the company has pushed back on colocation costs, with TD Cowen expecting Google to push for more self-builds. However, due to the need to catch up on its capacity gap, such a move is not expected soon.

Apple, meanwhile, has yet to show urgency in the data center sector. After publishing an RFP for capacity in late 2024, it's not clear if the company has responded.

The company is a major user of Google Cloud, alongside operating its own data centers. It is also planning to roll out its own server chips in 2026.