Data centre
A building, or a group of buildings, housing servers, storage and network equipment. It also has the power supply and cooling that keep those machines running around the clock, and the guards and security systems that protect them. The cloud is what customers rent, and the data centre is where it physically sits. An AI data centre is built around large groups of graphics processors. These use far more electricity than ordinary servers and are packed close together, so the building needs more power and liquid cooling. New data centres now open more slowly because grid connections and power equipment are in short supply. Cloud companies own some data centres. Others belong to firms that rent out space, power, cooling and network connections to companies that bring their own servers. Some companies also build data centres for their own use.
AI comes in-house
…$44,600,5 a purchase one company can make on its own. For companies that already ran data centres, putting AI at the centre was the natural way to go. Centralised computing grows only through new sites, and each one now meets resistance. In one quarter, local opponents…
AI runs on borrowed money
…operating loss for 2025 was $20.9 billion, on revenue of $13.1 billion.2 Their data centres are being built on credit, and JPMorgan expects the debt behind it all to reach $4.1 trillion.3 They keep building, because more people use AI and more work moves onto it…