BI reporters from our award-winning data center portfolio share what they’re seeing this year

Looking forward

The data center boom had crept into America, and we were ready for it. Business Insider jumped on this topic nearly two years ago, and last week we won a George Polk Award for our work, which included a first-of-its-kind interactive map of data centers across the country and an interesting video demonstrating their impact.

We reached out to top journalists about the package to get their take on what to watch in data centers this year.

Hannah Picklerdata centers’ use of water and electricity to produce computing power for artificial intelligence has been a large part of your work. Looking to the future, what are the biggest concerns on this front?

Many questions remain: Will technology companies adhere to the commitments some have made to pay for building the network infrastructure? Will new strategies for on-site power generation in data centers mitigate rising electricity bills? And even if they did, would this approach harm air quality? How will communities protect their precious and often limited drinking water as thirsty data centers build nearby?

Dakin Campbellthe market loves the AI ​​boom but also periodically signals limited appetite for huge spending to build these data centers. What are the main concerns on Wall Street now?

In my conversations with bankers and others in the finance game, Wall Street has two, maybe three, big questions.

First, how concerned should we be about circular deals in which the likes of Nvidia invest in AI labs that then buy up Nvidia chips? These deals may boost the market in an unsustainable way.

Second, many of these data center deals are backed by big technology companies, which spend hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers — spending that must eventually be recouped. Any significant decline in the creditworthiness of these companies could impact broader credit markets.

Third, what are the bottlenecks in power, gas turbines, memory chips, and other inputs, and how could this slow down the construction process? Time is money, and the longer it takes to build data centers, the more expensive it is.

Robert LeslieWhat do you plan to look at using satellite images?

Newly released satellite images clearly show trends in data center construction across the United States. We hope to study the speed of construction as well as the size of data centers.

We can already see how large some of these gigawatt sites are, with Meta’s Hyperion in Louisiana expected to be larger than Central Park. High-resolution satellite images can also provide clues to help us calculate a data center’s overall energy use.

Given the scale of these projects, I’m also looking at the impact these massive server factories have on rural communities.

Thanks everyone! As always, please reach out to me with any ideas eic@businessinsider.com.