Site Selection: How Data Centers Are Reshaping Rural America

Pastoral places that used to host horse farms and tractor pulls will soon power the artificial intelligence we use for everything from streaming services to driverless cars.

That is because AI requires real infrastructure, and the capital investment needed to build that infrastructure does not come cheap.

Newmark, in its 2023 U.S. Data Center Market Overview released in January 2024, attempted to quantify the impact of AI on data center investment — and the results are staggering. The top five hyperscalers spent $158 billion on data centers in 2022, led by Amazon’s $64 billion, Google’s $32 billion, and Meta’s $31 billion. Microsoft chipped in $25 billion, while Oracle added $6 billion. Just five years earlier, these same five firms spent a combined $42 billion.

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