If investment in data centres is about to slow, nobody told Mark Zuckerberg. On January 29th, during an earnings call, Meta\u2019s boss boasted that the social-media giant had plans to build an artificial-intelligence (AI<\/small>) data centre \u201cso big that it\u2019ll cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His timing was conspicuous. Only two days earlier the share prices of firms from Nvidia, a chipmaker, to Dell, a manufacturer of servers used in data centres, had nosedived<\/a> in response to the release of a new AI<\/small> model created by DeepSeek<\/a>, a Chinese firm. Its training costs were a fraction of those for similarly powerful Western models, raising questions over how much computing power\u2014and investment\u2014is needed to develop ai<\/small> systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although many of those share prices have since recovered, the episode has brought increased scrutiny to the huge sums of money that are being spent on data centres. Meta and America\u2019s three big cloud-service providers\u2014Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft\u2014forked out a combined $180bn on data-centre infrastructure last year. Add in spending by smaller tech firms, telecoms providers, big enterprises and data-centre operators such as Digital Realty and Equinix, and the figure rises to around $465bn. Land, buildings and peripheral gear such as electrical equipment make up about 30% of that, with chips, server racks, networking kit and the like accounting for the rest. Cashed-up private-equity firms such as Blackstone have been lured in by the spending boom, undertaking a record $70bn-worth of data-centre deals last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read it all<\/a>.<\/p> The data-centre investment spree shows no signs of stopping https:\/\/t.co\/SckehPpeGp<\/a><\/p>\u2014 Marc Baronnet (@baronnet) February 5, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote>