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So You Want to Build a Data Center…

The A.I. gold rush is spreading the wealth far beyond the pick-and-shovel providers like Nvidia and other chipmakers. But the industries supporting the infrastructure build-out have a different challenge: too much demand.

data center
Roughly 100 gigawatts of new data center capacity are expected to be added between now and 2030 worldwide, which would just about double the current global capacity, and half of that will be devoted to A.I. workloads. Photo: Akos Stiller/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Ian Krietzberg
February 10, 2026

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If artificial intelligence is the treasure in our modern-day gold rush, and chipmakers are selling the picks and shovels, then data centers—and all the infrastructure they represent—are the modern-day boomtowns in this increasingly strained metaphor. As of late last year, nearly 3,000 new data centers were under construction or planned in the United States alone. The resources being committed to this project are unlike almost anything in American history, with the exception of railroad construction in the 19th century.