Physical facilities that house the servers, GPUs, networking equipment, and cooling systems needed to train and run AI models. Modern AI data centers are purpose-built for massive parallel computation, consuming megawatts of power and requiring specialized cooling. A single frontier model training run might occupy thousands of GPUs across an entire facility for months.
Why it matters
Data centers are the factories of the AI era. Every query to Claude, every image from Midjourney, every video from Runway runs on hardware sitting in one of these buildings. The global shortage of AI-ready data center capacity is one of the biggest constraints on AI growth — and one of the biggest investment opportunities.