Over the past few years, the tech industry's plans for artificial intelligence have grown from ambitious to outright treacherous, with the amount of money invested in the space so high it now poses a serious risk to the broader economy.

Underlying the broader, often poorly-defined AI tech are data centers, which are vast warehouses stuffed to the brim with specialized chips that transform energy into computational power, thus making all your Grok fact checks possible.

The economics of data centers are fuzzy at best, as the ludicrous amount of money spent building them makes it difficult to get a full picture. In less than two years, for example, Texas revised its fiscal year 2025 cost projection on private data center projects from $130 million to $1 billion.

However, a recent deep dive

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