AI compute demand is growing at over twice the rate of Moore’s Law, and the implications are staggering.
To put it simply: just to meet current demand, the world must invest $500 billion per year in data centers — every single year — through 2030.
For decades, Moore’s Law defined progress: the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. But AI has shattered that. Compute demand has exploded at 2× Moore’s pace for the past decade, turning compute itself into the planet’s most valuable commodity.
By 2028, global data center spending is projected to reach $900 billion, with AI servers growing at +41% CAGR and total infrastructure growing +23% CAGR. Yet despite the boom, data centers face an $800 billion revenue shortfall — we’ll need nearly $2 trillion in additional funding to build enough capacity through 2030.
The construction surge is unprecedented:
- $40 billion worth of U.S. data centers are under construction — +400% since 2022.
- For the first time, their total value will soon surpass office buildings.
- Construction costs alone (excluding chips and servers) have soared to $43 billion annually, up +322% in four years.
But there’s a darker side: energy.
AI data centers could consume 1,600 terawatt-hours of electricity by 2035 — nearly 4.4% of global power. Demand is expected to quadruple within a decade.
That raises two urgent questions:
- Where will the money come from?
- Where will the power come from?
The answers may lie in two frontier technologies:
- Nuclear energy, which runs 24/7 and matches AI’s constant draw.
- Quantum computing, which could exponentially reduce compute demand through qubit-based processing.
And here’s the twist: despite all the hype, valuations aren’t in a bubble. Forward P/E ratios across AI-linked stocks are half of what they were during the 2000 dot-com peak. Companies are actually getting cheaper as they scale — a signal that this revolution is more grounded in fundamentals than speculation.
We are still very early in the AI revolution — but the transformation is spreading across stocks, bonds, energy, and even commodities.
💡 The takeaway: Data centers are the new oil wells. Compute is the new currency. The race isn’t just for intelligence — it’s for the infrastructure that powers it.
