Bloomberg published a piece on the estimated expenses to construct an AI data center in Texas
Servers make up at least half the bill, and demand has more than doubled their average price in 2 years while DRAM costs over 5 times last year’s price.
Grids rarely have a spare gigawatt in one place, so developers either pay $584K per megawatt for grid-connected land or build their own gas generation, whose cost has tripled in recent years.
About $750B of hyperscaler capex this year chases the same turbines, steel, copper and fiber, so power-gear backlogs run past 2030 and a 1GW site may need nearly $3B for overruns.
GPU racks run hot enough to need liquid cooling, which makes merely installing the servers and cooling units in a 1GW site cost about $1.2B.