Rohan Paul

Bloomberg published a piece on the estimated expenses to construct an AI data center in Texas > Servers make up at least half the bill, and demand has more than doubled their average price in 2 years while DRAM costs over 5 times last year’s price. > Grids rarely have a spare gigawatt in one place, so developers either pay $584K per megawatt for grid-connected land or build their own gas generation, whose cost has tripled in recent years. > About $750B of hyperscaler capex this year chases the same turbines, steel, copper and fiber, so power-gear backlogs run past 2030 and a 1GW site may need nearly $3B for overruns. > GPU racks run hot enough to need liquid cooling, which makes merely installing the servers and cooling units in a 1GW site cost about $1.2B.