Investing.com -- Amazon Web Services has paused portions of its colocation leasing discussions, signaling a slowdown in hyperscale activity, according to a new note from Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) on Tuesday.
The bank said the move appears to mirror similar actions by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), another major player in the data center space.
“Over the weekend, we heard from several industry sources that AWS has paused a portion of its leasing discussions on the colocation side (particularly international ones),” Wells Fargo analysts wrote.
While the extent of the pause remains unclear, the firm emphasized that “they are digesting aggressive recent lease-up deals,” and are not canceling already signed agreements.
The report also notes that some moderating hyperscale leasing near-term is happening across the two largest cloud providers—Microsoft and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).
Still, other hyperscalers are said to remain active. “Meta, Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) all remain active, in addition to elevated activity at NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA),” Wells Fargo said, pointing to continued demand from other major players.
The aggressive expansion of Project Stargate, a joint effort between OpenAI and Oracle, is said to have also contributed to leasing momentum.
According to Wells Fargo, AWS currently maintains over 9 gigawatts (GWs) of active power capacity across its data center footprint, with an estimated 70% self-built and about 2.5 GWs leased from third-party providers. AWS has plans to build up to 23 GWs of self-built power capacity over time.
Wells Fargo stressed that pauses like this are not necessarily unusual. “Historically, these ‘digestion’ periods last 6–12 months (and in some cases are much shorter),” the analysts noted.
They cited Google as an example, which pulled back from leasing in late 2024 but “re-accelerated meaningfully in early 2025.”
“It’s not clear yet whether AWS slowing some leases is an area of concern, or just the natural ebbs and flows of hyperscale activity,” the report concluded.