Hot and power-hungry: ‘Manhattan-sized’ data centers are just the beginning

The era of supersized data centers is upon us. As artificial intelligence dominates the agendas of the tech giants, the need for bigger and more powerful data centers is accelerating, and it’s leading to a building boom that could reshape the American landscape.

“We aren’t seeing gigawatt buildings yet, but it’s really only a matter of time,” says Dan Drennan, data centers sector leader at Corgan, the top-ranking architecture firm on Building Design + Construction’s annual list of revenue for data center design.

These rising demands are creating new challenges for the design of data centers, from the power generation needed to the infrastructure to the buildings that contain the servers that make AI work. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, everything is getting bigger.

Meta recently announced plans to build data centers that use up to 5 gigawatts of power. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced plans earlier this year to invest up to $500 billion in a vast data center building spree. These and other so-called hyperscale data users like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are expected to drive most of the growth in data centers in the U.S. and globally, according to an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group.