Billion-Dollar Data Centers Are Taking Over the World

When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI’s Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn’t kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth’s circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia—not agricultural estates, but AI data centers.

Tech executives like Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison are fully bought in to the idea that the future of the American (and possibly global) economy are these new warehouses stocked with IT infrastructure. But data centers, of course, aren’t actually new. In the earliest days of computing there were giant power-sucking mainframes in climate-controlled rooms, with co-ax cables moving information from the mainframe to a terminal computer. Then the consumer internet boom of the late 1990s spawned a new era of infrastructure. Massive buildings began popping up in the backyard of Washington, DC, with racks and racks of computers that stored and processed data for tech companies.

A decade later, “the cloud” became the squishy infrastructure of the internet. Storage got cheaper. Some companies, like Amazon, capitalized on this. Giant data centers continued to proliferate, but instead of a tech company using some combination of on-premise servers and rented data center racks, they offloaded their computing needs to a bunch of virtualized environments. (“What is the cloud?” a perfectly intelligent family member asked me in the mid-2010s, “and why am I paying for 17 different subscriptions to it?”)

All the while tech companies were hoovering up petabytes of data, data that people willingly shared online, in enterprise workspaces, and through mobile apps. Firms began finding new ways to mine and structure this “Big Data,” and promised that it would change lives. In many ways, it did. You had to know where this was going.

Now the tech industry is in the fever-dream days of generative AI, which requires new levels of computing resources. Big Data is tired; big data centers are here, and wired—for AI. 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 proverbial couch, proclaiming their love for AI. The industry has entered an unprecedented era of capital investments in AI infrastructure, tilting the US into positive GDP territory. These are massive, swirling deals that might as well be cocktail party handshakes, greased with gigawatts and exuberance, while the rest of us try to track real contracts and dollars.

OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and SoftBank have struck some of the biggest deals. This year an earlier supercomputing project between OpenAI and Microsoft, called Stargate, became the vehicle for a massive AI infrastructure project in the US. (President Donald Trump called it the largest AI infrastructure project in history, because of course he did, but that may not have been hyperbolic.) Altman, Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son were all in on the deal, pledging $100 billion to start, with plans to invest up to $500 billion into Stargate in the coming years. Nvidia GPUs would be deployed. Later, in July, OpenAI and Oracle announced an additional Stargate partnership—SoftBank curiously absent—measured in gigawatts of capacity (4.5) and expected job creation (around 100,000).