How many data centers does the world need for the AI revolution?

The world is set for a massive expansion in data centers by 2025, driven by major players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, who are investing billions to support the AI revolution, with thousands of new data centers planned globally to meet the surging demand

The following are the new data center projects announced:

𝗔𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗼𝗻
In the first half of 2024, AWS announced $50B in new data center projects, including 216 new buildings. Overall, Amazon has committed $100-150B over the next 15 years. Recent commitments include: An $11B campus in Indiana, $10B across two campuses in Mississippi, $5.3B in new data centers across Saudi Arabia, a new nuclear-powered data center near Salem, Pennsylvania, a new planned data center near Round Rock, Texas and a $15B commitment in Japan. Germany, Taiwan and Singapore.

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Microsoft now has 5GW of energy capacity and is reportedly doubling new data center construction in 2024. Recent announcements include: $3.3B in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, $1B in Northwest Indiana, $1B in Floyd County, Georgia, $4.3B in France, $3.5B in Germany, $3.2B in the UK, $3.2B in Sweden, $2.1B in Spain, $2.2B in Malaysia, $1.7B in Indonesia, $1B in Kenya and a new data center in Mexico. There have been reports of a $100B Stargate data center, although this is not confirmed.

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Google is the smallest of the three cloud providers by a wide margin. The GCP pitch has long been that it’s better for AI companies. Now, that is being put to the test. Google is building a new $2B data center in Indiana, a $1B data center in Kansas City, Missouri, a $1.1B data center in Finland and a $576M data center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗮:
Meta does not operate a cloud business, but has nonetheless been scaling its data center capacity to support Llama and other internal AI initiatives. Meta recently announced that it has accumulated 350k H100 GPUs, as part of a total fleet of 600k H100 equivalents. The company also announced two 24k GPU clusters dedicated for Llama 3 training. Meta has four new data centers in the works, including in Kuna, Idaho, Temple, Texas, Davenport, Iowa and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

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Big companies like IBM, Oracle, Alibaba and Apple have also announced to invest billions into new data centers.

The race is on to build the infrastructure needed to power the AI revolution. There will be a transformation not only in the field of AI, but also across industries, from increased energy demands to increased construction and materials for these “AI factories.”

Data source: Sequoia Capital