The bottleneck in AI is no longer chips. It is power, and the scramble to secure it is sending data-centre builders to the banks for billions in financing commitments, Bloomberg reports.The shift is a big one.
For much of the AI boom the scarce resource was Nvidia’s GPUs; now it is electricity, along with the contracts, substations, and financing needed to deliver it at scale.
The numbers are staggering. The four largest cloud firms are set to spend around $725bn on AI infrastructure this year alone, and single sites now carry price tags that would once have funded a whole company, like Meta’s $13bn Texas data centre.
Power is what makes those sites so expensive. Server racks that drew about 3kW for ordinary computing now pull up to 150kW for AI, and global data-centre capacity is expected to nearly double to roughly 200GW by 2030.
That is where the banks come in. Builders want firm financing pledges before they commit to power deals and construction contracts, and the sums are large enough that no single balance sheet wants to carry them alone.
