Why Do AI Data Centers Take So Long to Build?

Ed Zitron says an AI data center takes far longer to build than the race for more compute assumes. He calls each one the single most ambitious infrastructure project in history.

Oracle has been building OpenAI's site in Abilene, Texas for two and a half years. He puts the building at about 998,000 square feet, drawing the power of a small city, and he uses Bristol in England as the picture: the power of that city, packed into several large warehouses. Hyperscalers are adding the capacity because they see demand, but he says most of the demand is OpenAI and Anthropic. He estimates that 80 percent or more of AI compute spend comes from those two companies. Microsoft alone, he says, has spent over a quarter of a trillion dollars on capital expenditures since 2022.