And why does it matter to you? Well, if your buildings are half-built and the bubble bursts, then either the money or the will to finish them dries up. “We are re-evaluating our strategic plan in light of industry trends” or some such corporate babble. The needs of your community will not be part of the algorithm for what to do next.
Caveat emptor.
Please don’t say you’re too young to remember the Dotcom bubble
The circle on the left is the current size of the data center business — $350B. The circle on the right is the aggregate investment total of the currently proposed data center projects — $2.5T. No doubt developers are throwing proposals against the wall to see which ones will stick and they don’t expect all of them to stick.
No mature, sane industry grows that fast.
For the record, the circles were carefully drawn to scale.
Experts in finance tell the story far better than anyone. Below are links to articles and videos if you want professional opinions on just how bubbly the AI data center buildout is. Check back often as more will be added as discovered.
https://pracap.com/global-crossing-reborn/
https://pracap.com/an-ai-addendum/
https://publicenterprise.org/wp-content/uploads/Bubble-or-Nothing.pdf
https://youtu.be/9jaFg-AZh4w?si=pz3gAn7jxFTiF3sm
Or, just Google “AI bubble” and see how many hits you get. It begs the question: if everyone knows we’re in a bubble, why is everyone still going ga-ga trying to build data centers? The answer is simple:
AI is eventually going to be everywhere, in every product
Current AI is computationally expensive (currently)
If there’s a small chance I won’t have the compute and storage capacity to put AI in all my products, my business is at risk of losing to the competitors who do
They have to play the game.