Source: Financial Times (paywall)
Capital deployment for data center infrastructure hit $60 billion across 42 mega-deals in the first half of 2024. Hyperscalers and infrastructure funds are betting that AI compute demand will outpace available capacity. Global construction pipelines include 850 facilities valued at $7 trillion, revealing a scale gap: investment velocity remains insufficient to prevent compute bottlenecks that could constrain generative AI deployment across enterprise and consumer use. This reflects contractual commitments from cloud providers, not speculative M&A. Hardware constraints have become the primary commercial battleground in the AI era.