Anatomy Of A $49 Billion Gigawatt: What's Inside An AI Data Center, Who Builds It, And Why The Price Keeps Going Up

Everyone has an opinion on how many data centers are being built. Far fewer people could tell you what is actually inside one.

That's a problem, because the answer to the second question is quickly becoming the answer to the first. Over the past year the market obsessed over Power (can you get electricity?) and Planning (will the town let you build?). Now, according to Morgan Stanley, the next debate is Price: what it costs to build the thing in the first place. And on that front the numbers are, well, moving in only one direction: the all-in cost of an average US data center is now $49 billion per gigawatt, according to BofA's latest annual "Who Makes the Data Center" primer, up $20 billion from just three years ago.