A flurry of mega investments in data centers from the likes of Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, CoreWeave, and Blackstone Inc. this week were the boldest evidence yet of an urgent need to train and roll out artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Tech giants and private-equity firms are pouring tens of billions of dollars of investments into data centers to build out artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in a dizzying series of announcements this week.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday said the company will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge AI data centers in the U.S., including the first multi-gigawatt data center, called Prometheus, expected to come online in Ohio in 2026.
Meta expects to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on AI data center projects in 2025, up from $35 billion to $40 billion in 2024, in pursuit of what Zuckerberg calls “superintelligence,” AI systems that can match or surpass human capabilities on a wide range of tasks.
The company’s data center binge also includes Hyperion, a $10 billion campus in Louisiana expected to eventually reach five gigawatts of capacity, making it one of the largest such facilities in the world. Zuckerberg described the new clusters as “multi-gigawatt” with one of the sites covering an area nearly the size of Manhattan.
Google, meanwhile, will invest $25 billion in data centers in Pennsylvania and neighboring states over the next two years as part of a data center blitz of its own.
The company said it has agreed to secure as much as 3 gigawatts of hydropower in the world’s largest corporate clean power pact for hydroelectricity. Google’s agreement with Brookfield Asset Management includes initial 20-year power purchase agreements, totaling $3 billion, for electricity generated from two hydropower facilities in Pennsylvania.
Google President Ruth Porat was scheduled to provide details Tuesday at an AI summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where President Donald Trump and Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., announced $92 billion in investments ($36 billion for data center projects, $56 billion in new energy projects) across 20 organizations.
During the summit, Blackstone President Jon Gray said his company plans to inject $25 billion into developing data centers and power plants in Pennsylvania. The private-equity firm intends to partner with an electric utility to construct natural gas power generation facilities to power the data centers in Pennsylvania.
“What makes us so excited about this area is the idea that you can co locate data centers directly next to the source of power and that’s really the special sauce here is being able to put these things together,” Gray said.
Additionally, AI cloud computing firm CoreWeave on Tuesday said it would spend as much as $6 billion on building an AI data center, also in Pennsylvania. Initially, the company plans a 100 megawatt (MW) data center in Lancaster that will be able to expand to 300 MW.
“The demand for high-performance AI compute is relentless, and CoreWeave is scaling a cloud purpose-built for AI to meet it and strengthen U.S. leadership,” CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said in a statement.
The investment frenzy isn’t surprising given the demand for massive amounts of clean electricity to power data centers necessary for AI and cloud computing, which have driven U.S. power consumption to record highs.
“The Capex commits continue to come fast and furious,” Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, said on X. “AI Bubble bears will continue to be wrong on this trend. The race to super intelligence will fuel a staggering multi-year infrastructure investment.”
