Amazon’s AWS has has paused some leasing discussions around new data centres, Wells Fargo analysts said, in a fresh sign that major cloud providers are showing caution on the billions in their announced AI cloud infrastructure spending plans.

Wells Fargo analysts said in a note that they had heard from “several industry sources” saying AWS had suspended “a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side (particularly international ones)”.

The analysts said the suspensions had affected new projects, but not signed deals, adding that the positioning was similar to recent moves from Microsoft.

Caution

They said AWS appeared to be “digesting aggressive recent lease-up deals”.

“It does appear like the hyperscalers are being more discerning with leasing large clusters of power, and tightening up pre-lease windows for capacity that (would) be delivered before the end of 2026,” the note said.

The analysts said Meta, Google and Oracle remained active in leasing data centres.

Kevin Miller, vice president of AWS Global Data Centers, said in a post on LinkedIn that the note referred to “routine” measures.

“This is routine capacity management, and there haven’t been any recent fundamental changes in our expansion plans,” he said.

Analysts and investors have been closely watching large tech companies’ data centre spending plans amidst billions of dollars of planned infrastructure spending.

Those plans have been called into question over concerns that returns could take a long time to materialise, if ever, and the launch of China’s DeepSeek, whose power-efficient AI models questioned the efficacy of large spending.

Noelle Walsh, Microsoft’s president of cloud operations, said last week that the company was slowing down or temporarily holding off on advancing early data centre build-outs.

Data centre pause

Her remarks followed a note from TD Cowen analysts in March that said Microsoft had dropped new data centre projects in the US and Europe amounting to about 2 gigawatts of electricity consumption in the past six months, due to oversupply relative to its current demand forecast for AI services.

Microsoft’s shift has involved lease cancellations and deferrals, the note said.

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy earlier this month justified the company’s AI spending plans, saying they were necessary to remain competitive.