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The data centre investment spree shows no signs of stopping
Demand for processing power will continue to outpace supply.
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There are now as many as 11,000 data centres around the world, according to one estimate.
PHOTO: ST FILE
The Economist
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If investment in data centres is about to slow, nobody told Mark Zuckerberg. On Jan 29, during an earnings call, Meta’s boss boasted that the social media giant had plans to build an artificial intelligence (AI) data centre “so big that it’ll cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there”.
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 in response to the release of a new AI model created by DeepSeek, a Chinese firm. Its training costs were a fraction of those for similarly powerful Western models, raising questions over how much computing power – and investment – is needed to develop AI systems.
