Data centres (2025)

Coming to a field near you: lots and lots of concrete. And electricity.

Blame AI. The AI boom requires greater processing power which, in turn, requires more data centres. Consider this: a query on ChatGPT is around 10x more power intensive than a Google search, according to a 2024 Goldman Sachs report.

To accommodate all these AI chips, data centre operators are planning and constructing facilities with capacity of 200-500 megawatts; Morgan Stanley analysts estimate the cost of building a campus at $10m per megawatt.

The price of admission to this game, then, is a steep one (Forbes is calling it the trillion-dollar tsunami). Tech’s spend on data centres is set to be extravagant. Four companies — Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google — promise to spend a combined $300bn on AI infrastructure this year alone. The first data centre associated with the $100bn Stargate venture from OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle will be the size of Central Park.

Europe is trying to keep up but it will be difficult. France recently announced €109bn to invest more in AI and data centres, with President Emmanuel Macron promising to “plug, baby, plug” nuclear-powered AI. France’s great AI hope — Paris-based Mistral — says it will invest “several billions” in a data centre south of the capital.

Several data-centre-related companies have raised big money. UK-based Ori, which partners with data centres to rent cloud-based services, nabbed $140m this month. Nscale, also based in the UK, is building data centres in countries including Norway; it raised $155m in late 2024. Meanwhile, Swedish startup Evroc, which has raised around $60m, recently announced plans to build an AI data centre in France.

Given how much money is needed to build these facilities, the most interesting angle for VCs could be: how do you make sure they use energy efficiently? These are resource-hungry facilities that use a lot of electricity to keep servers cool and the internet running. In Ireland, data centres consumed over a fifth of the country’s electricity in 2023, overtaking the amount of power used by all urban Irish homes combined.

Sifted recently reported that Berlin-based VC firm Project A is looking into startups working on tech to lower the temperature of data centre servers. VC firm Speedinvest is looking “very seriously” at four companies, including one in optimisation (around faster and more efficient data processing and energy usage) and one focused on cooling.