Billion-dollar data centers are taking over the world

When Sam Altman One year ago he said that OpenAI‘s Roman Empire He is The actual Roman EmpireHe wasn’t kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually built an empire of lands spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth’s circumference, the CEO and his team are now dotting the planet with their own land — not agricultural real estate, but… Artificial intelligence data centers.

Technology executives like Altman, CEO of Nvidia Jensen HuangCEO of Microsoft Satya Nadellaand co-founder of Oracle Larry Ellison They have fully bought into the idea that the future of the American (and perhaps global) economy lies in these new warehouses equipped with IT infrastructure. But data centers, of course, aren’t actually new. In the early days of computing, there were giant mainframes that absorbed power in climate-controlled rooms, with coaxial cables that carried information from the mainframe to a peripheral computer. Then the consumer Internet boom of the late 1990s ushered in a new era of infrastructure. Huge buildings are starting to spring up in Washington, D.C.’s backyard, with racks and racks of computers storing and processing data for technology companies.

A decade later, the “cloud” has become the vulnerable infrastructure of the Internet. Storage has become cheaper. Some companies like Amazon She took advantage of this. Giant data centers continued to proliferate, but instead of a technology company using a set of on-premises servers and rented data center racks, it offloaded its computing needs to a set of virtual environments. (“What is it The cloud“Why am I paying for 17 different subscriptions?” a perfectly intelligent family member asked me in mid-2010.

All the while, technology companies were collecting large amounts of data, data that people willingly shared online, in enterprise workspaces, and through mobile apps. Companies began to find new ways to extract and structure this “big data,” which they promised would change people’s lives. I did it in many ways. You had to know where this was going.

Now the technology industry is experiencing the fever dream days of generative AI, which requires new levels of computing resources. Big data is tiring; The massive data centers are here, wired for artificial intelligence. Faster, more efficient chips are needed to power AI data centers, and chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD have been jumping up and down on the couch, declaring their love for AI. The industry has entered an unprecedented era of capital investments in AI infrastructure, pushing the United States into positive GDP territory. They’re huge, swirling deals that might as well be handshakes at cocktail parties, charged with gigawatts and verve, while the rest of us try to track down the real contracts and dollars.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and SoftBank have made some of the biggest deals. This year, a previous supercomputing project between OpenAI and Microsoft, called Stargate, became the vehicle for a massive AI infrastructure project in the United States. (President Donald Trump He called it the largest AI infrastructure project in history, because of course he did, but that was probably not an exaggeration.) Altman, Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son They were all in on the deal, pledging $100 billion to get it started, with plans to invest up to $500 billion in the Stargate in the coming years. Nvidia GPUs will be deployed. Later, in July, OpenAI and Oracle announced an additional partnership with Stargate – SoftBank was strangely absent – ​​which was measured in gigawatts of capacity (4.5) and projected job creation (about 100,000).