Big Tech's race toward a future built on AI is speeding up.
On quarterly earnings calls with investors last week, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all announced massive increases in their infrastructure spending plans for the year as the AI boom accelerates. Amazon signaled it will blow past its initial $100 billion capex target, Google announced a $10 billion capex hike, Meta increased its forecast slightly, and Microsoft also forecast a record $30 billion in capital spending for the current fiscal first quarter.
Much of this massive investment will fuel the rush to build even more data centers. By Business Insider's count, companies had filed permits to build 311 data centers in the US as of 2010. By the end of 2024, that number had nearly quadrupled.
Business Insider identified 1,240 data centers in America already built or approved for construction at the end of last year — the most comprehensive tally to date. Mapping these locations reveals two states where data center construction is particularly booming: Northern Virginia, with 329 data centers, and Maricopa County, Arizona, with 48. But new hot spots are emerging in places like the Central Ohio region or Sarpy, Nebraska.
Amid the scramble to capitalize on the economic transformation promised by AI, cities and states give away millions in tax breaks to build data centers, with relatively few full-time jobs promised in return. In Ohio, tax breaks given to developers can amount over time to more than $2 million in tax savings for every permanent, full-time job at an operational data center, Business Insider's analysis found. And new local ordinances allow data centers to be built cheek-by-jowl with residential neighborhoods, leaving locals to live next to industrial complexes that operate 24/7.
This unprecedented build-out comes at an extreme cost. The 322 data centers in Business Insider's count that are among the very largest data centers can consume as much power as a city and up to several million gallons of water a day.
Collectively, Business Insider estimates that US data centers could soon consume more electricity than Poland, with a population of 36.6 million, used in 2023.