The numbers are truly staggering. From the lead story in the weekend edition of Investor’s Business Daily (IBD),
In April, [Mark] Zuckerberg told investors that the company planned about $68 billion in capital spending this year. That would represent roughly 35% of the company’s 2025 projected revenue, according to FactSet, up from 24% last year and 16% back in 2021.
The company, of course, is Meta, the old Facebook plus Instagram and other properties. The company has a market capitalization of $1.8 trillion. By that measure, it is the world’s sixth-largest company.
What’s Zuckerberg going to spend that $68 billion on this year? IBD tells us,
That’s money focused on building data centers with advanced computing chips to help Meta train and operate AI models.
How big?
Zuckerberg earlier this month pledged to spend “hundreds of billions” on AI infrastructure, including toward a Manhattan-size data center.
For scale, the island of Manhattan runs for over 13 miles and occupies almost 23 square miles between the Hudson and East rivers.
A few months back I had occasion to fly into Washington, DC’s Dulles Airport (IAD). As the plane descended to the runway, all you could see for mile after mile were data centers, the roofs covered in air-conditioning units, the buildings surrounded by back up diesel generators. I have glimpsed the future.
People speak of “the cloud” and “cloud computing.” There is no cloud. There are only servers, arranged in racks, cooled by giant HVAC units, powered by all the electricity there is. Measured in gigawatts.
These data centers have mass, they occupy space. So much space.
In fact, in that same IBD edition, they feature (p. A2) investment opportunities in cooling down server farms, “AI cooling plays heat up.”
It’s a modern-day land rush, figuratively and literally.
