This is pushing up prices for workers, electricity, and even commercial real estate (as well as consumer products that use chips), notes the Wall Street Journal, and reducing the construction on new houses and apartment buildings. And in addition, the paper points out, projections for this buildout "would double the electricity consumption of the entire U.S. residential sector."
The calculations come from Columbia Business School finance/real estate professor Stijn van Nieuwerburgh — and Reuters explains their significance:
Just as the rail and telecoms expansions led to notable bubbles and busts, Van Nieuwerburgh wrote that the extent of the buildout, the still-untested revenue streams, and the intricate financing structure emerging around AI mean it could be primed for a fall. "This is freaking complicated," he said in a briefing with reporters of the arrangements emerging between AI firms, major tech hyperscalers, banks, private credit lenders, real estate firms, and a host of other players involved in building what he conservatively estimated at 183 gigawatts worth of new data-center capacity over the next seven years, compared with about 57 gigawatts currently installed.... The investment underway already has outstripped what the major players can fund from their own cash flows. The shift to outside financing has increased leverage, redistributed risks across the economy, and made the venture dependent on revenue streams that have yet to be proven, Van Nieuwerburgh noted in the paper, which will be presented on Friday...
"These developments do not imply that financial distress is imminent. Strong growth in AI applications, high utilization, and continued improvements in model capability could support the projected infrastructure and generate stable cash flows," he wrote. "But the combination of uncertain demand, rapid technological change, execution bottlenecks, and high leverage creates meaningful downside risk if expectations are revised." As an example, he wrote that the AI industry will need to be earning about $3.7 trillion in annual revenue by 2032 to achieve the expected return on the investment, and "given current estimates of annual combined revenues of OpenAI and Anthropic of around $100 billion, revenues would need to grow at roughly 80% per year."
The paper suggests policies that "improve measurement and transparency" for financing.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Investigations correspondent Louisa Loveluck reports on the Trump administration’s secret deportation deals, sending thousands of migrants to ‘third countries’ across the world
A Sierra Leonean nurse detained, handcuffed and flown to Ghana. An Iranian dissident to Central African Republic. A Cameroonian to Equatorial Guinea.
This is the face of the Trump administration’s deportations policy since 2025 – striking deals with 35 countries, and sending up to 25,000 migrants in the US across the world, often to places they have no connection to at all.
Continue reading...
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PORTADOWN (ANP/DPA) - De honderden demonstranten die zondag in het Noord-Ierse Portadown een omstreden pro-Britse mars tegenhielden, hebben de straat die zij blokkeerden verlaten. Een groep bewoners meldt volgens de BBC wel wacht te blijven houden op Garvaghy Road.
De demonstranten hielden een mars tegen van de protestantse Oranjeorde, die voor het eerst in 28 jaar door de katholieke wijk rond Garvaghy Road mocht trekken. De Oranjeorde trok zich daarop terug maar meldde zondag Portadown niet te verlaten voor leden de mars kunnen lopen. Gavin Robinson, de leider van de Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), zei dat de Oranjeorde bereid is "uren, dagen of maanden" te wachten.
Garvaghy Road was in de jaren 90 regelmatig het strijdtoneel rond de spanningen tussen katholieken en protestanten in Noord-Ierland. In 1998 kwam met het Goedevrijdagakkoord een einde aan de zogenoemde 'Troubles', het dodelijke gewapende conflict tussen de Ierse nationalisten en pro-Britse loyalisten.