Looking ahead
The data center boom crept up on America, and we were ready. Business Insider jumped on the topic nearly two years ago, and this past week we won a George Polk Award for our work, which included a first-of-its-kind interactive map of data centers across the country and a riveting video showing their impact.
We checked in with lead journalists on the package to get their take on what to watch in data centers this year.
Hannah Beckler, data centers’ use of water and electricity to produce computing power for AI was a big part of your work. Looking ahead, what are the biggest concerns on that front?
So many questions remain: Will tech companies uphold commitments some have made to pay for grid infrastructure buildout? Will novel strategies to generate power on-site at data centers alleviate spiking electricity bills? Even if they do, would such an approach damage air quality? And how will communities safeguard precious and often finite drinking water as thirsty data centers are built nearby?
Dakin Campbell, the market loves the AI boom but also periodically signals a limited appetite for the massive spending to build these data centers. What are the key concerns on Wall Street right now?
From my conversations with bankers and others in the financing game, Wall Street has two, maybe three, big questions.
One, how worried should we be about the circular deals in which the likes of Nvidia invest in the AI labs that then buy Nvidia chips? These deals may be boosting the market in a way that isn’t sustainable.
Two, many of these data center deals are backstopped by Big Tech companies, which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out data centers — spending that eventually needs to be made back. Any meaningful decline in the perceived creditworthiness of these companies could weigh on credit markets more broadly.
And three, what is the state of bottlenecks in power, gas turbines, memory chips, and other inputs, and how might that slow construction? Time is money, and the longer it takes to build the data centers, the more expensive it’s going to be.
Robert Leslie, what do you plan to look into with satellite imagery?
Newly released satellite imagery clearly shows the trends in data center build-out across the US. We hope to study the speed of construction as well as the size of data centers.
We can already see how vast some of these gigawatt-scale sites are, with Meta’s “Hyperion” in Louisiana set to be larger than Central Park. High-resolution satellite images can also provide clues to help us calculate a data center’s overall power usage.
Given the scale of these projects, I’m also looking into the impact these vast server factories are having on rural communities.
Thanks everyone! As always, any thoughts please reach me at eic@businessinsider.com.
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