Within six years, building the leading AI data center may cost $200B

Data centers to train and run AI may soon contain millions of chips, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and require power equivalent to a large city’s electricity grid, if the current trends hold. That’s according to a new study from researchers at Georgetown, Epoch AI, and Rand, which looked at the growth trajectory of AI data centers around the world from 2019 to this year. The co-authors compiled and analyzed a data set of over 500 AI data center projects and found that, while the computational performance of data centers is more than doubling annually, so are the power requirements and capital expenditures. The findings illustrate the challenge in building the necessary infrastructure to support the development of AI technologies in the coming decade. OpenAI, which recently said that roughly 10% of the world’s population is using its ChatGPT platform, has a partnership with Softbank and others to raise up to $500 billion to establish a network of AI data centers in the U.S. ( ... Read full article.