Building a 1 GW AI data center now costs about $100 billion
A 1 GW AI data center now costs roughly $100 billion to build, up from about $4–5 billion previously. Power infrastructure, including high-voltage copper cabling, advanced cooling, and networking account for a large share of the bill. Compute hardware—GPUs and servers—can make up around 60% of total costs, with NVIDIA GPUs cited as the biggest single component. The dynamic is tightening demand for both GPUs and industrial-grade copper as constraints such as copper shortages become more binding.