Supersized: The no-limit AI data center build-out

The great AI spending spree has reached an “epic level,” said and in The Wall Street Journal . Just in the past three years, tech firms have “committed more toward AI data centers than it cost to build the entire interstate highway system over four decades.” The splurge is most evident in remote places like Ellendale, N.D., where a $15 billion data center “bigger than 10 Home Depots” is under construction thanks to a little-known cloud computing firm called CoreWeave that has seen its fortunes skyrocket in recent months. Last week, OpenAI unveiled a “Central Park–size complex” in the Texas scrublands and disclosed plans to construct roughly a dozen more of them, a build-out that will cost $1 trillion. Some Silicon Valley watchers have begun to worry about parallels to the overzealous t