Capital, Not Compute, is the Real AI Bottleneck

Satisfying AI’s ravenous appetite for power and compute has kicked off a once-in-a-generation infrastructure expansion that is also one of the most expensive in modern history. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has estimated a single gigawatt of capacity can cost as much as $50B. With McKinsey projecting data center demand could reach 156 GW by 2030, the total investment required could approach $7 trillion. While the need for graphics processing units is immediate, the infrastructure needed to deploy them at scale can take years to finance and build.