Trillions of dollars are flowing into the data centers needed to power artificial intelligence, and Wall Street is paying close attention.
Nvidia’s stock fell 3 percent overnight after it revealed last month that, despite strong overall revenue, its quarterly equipment sales to data centers had missed analyst expectations.
Conversely, Oracle saw an 43 percent stock pop last week — its largest one-day jump in over 30 years — after announcing that OpenAI had agreed to buy $300 billion in computing power from the company.
“How does the digital economy exist?” said John Medina, a senior vice president at Moody’s, who specializes in infrastructure. “It exists on data centers.”
U.S. data center demand, driven largely by A.I., could triple by 2030, according to McKinsey, which would require data centers to make nearly $7 trillion in investment to keep up. OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle recently announced a pact to invest $500 billion in A.I. infrastructure through 2029. Meta and Alphabet are also investing billions. Merely saying “please” and “thank you” to a chatbot eats up tens of millions of dollars in processing power, according to the OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.
As skepticism rises about the financial return of A.I.,some investors are looking at the performance of data centers as an early indicator of emerging headwinds.
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The post What Wall Street Sees in the Data Center Boom appeared first on New York Times.
