BloombergNEF’s deep dive into the insane costs of building super-scale data centers for AI is quite the eye-opener:
Microsoft and OpenAI are in discussions about a $100 billion, 5GW supercomputer complex called Stargate. Amazon has said it plans to spend $150 billion in the next 15 years on data centers. Last month KKR and energy investor Energy Capital Partners entered an agreement to invest up to $50 billion in AI data centers. BlackRock has launched a $30 billion AI infrastructure fund.
These huge data centers will be as complex and expensive as aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines. The building alone for a 1GW data center will set you back up to $12 billion – for vibration-proof construction, power supply, UPS systems, cooling, and so on. 100,000 GPUs could cost you another $4 billion, and that’s before you have installed chip-based or immersive liquid cooling, and super-high-bandwidth, low-latency communications.
Reading the report makes you realize that the old adage of “selling shovels to the gold diggers” is as true for AI as it was for most other technologies before that. Everyone in the datacenter space—rejoice! Your future is bright. ;)
