Bloomberg：四大科技巨头CapEx达7500亿美元，数据中心成本全面飙升

All right. We want to get to one of the most read stories on the Bloomberg terminal today. It is about the staring costs of a single eye data center, from steel, cement to chips and copper to land engineering power and more. There's a lot that goes into the cost of those data centers. And increasingly, all of those things cost a lot more than they used to. Okay. But given how expensive everything is, when you add it all up, it's actually not that difficult to see how meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet are spending a whopping $750 billion on CapEx alone.

No, that's at least when you scroll through this story. Oh, I know right? Yeah. You get you get it. And I keep thinking about Mandy's story in research about the spend next year about 1.7 trillion. And I see this number and you realize how much is really, um, because of these four companies. Big. Well Indian as the byline with an assist from Ian King. Linden is Bloomberg News managing editor of technology. She used to be out here in New York.

Now she's out there in California. Ian King is Bloomberg News U.S. semiconductor reporter. They both joined us from San Francisco. Lynn, I just love how you opened this story. Contextualizing just how big a number $750 billion is. Can you just lay it out for us? Uh, well, first of all, thanks for having me. I missed you all out there in New York. I'm sorry. I have to tell in by zoom these days. Um, I felt like that 750 billion needed a lot of context.

It's just such a massive number, right. As you say, we're talking about it heading into the trillion dollar, um, realm next year. And so I thought, how can I wrap people's heads around this? I know GDP of a country. Yes, it was GDP of all of Ireland, of all of Belgium. It's more than half of what all of the companies in the S&P 500 index spent in the total in total last year. It's enough to cut $5,500. Um, uh, in a check for every household in the, in the US.

So it's a lot. I mean, I think that the only thing that is comparable to this is the build out to the U.S. Highway System. Um. Uh, otherwise, we have never seen such a build out, um, of this enormity, uh, dollar wise. And let's bring you into this, because, as we know, these data centers are complicated. There's a lot of moving parts and a lot of those parts, whether it's power, whether it's semiconductors increasingly have gone up.

Um, and I think a lot of it is just basic supply and demand. There's just so much demand that the prices of these things have gone up, and it just costs a lot to make them all happen. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, you got to think about it. The main component in these buildings is something that's like a couple of square inches and you're paying $30,000 for one of those. It's using as much electricity as several large flat screen televisions.

And you're putting 72 of those in a server. So imagine the expense of just putting one server there and feeding it with power for a year. And obviously there's more than just one server in these machines as lines in these giant data centers is Lin's story really, really shows very well. Uh, Ian, I'm wondering, though, if this stuff gets cheaper and remember, we have the Oracle force majeure that we saw just a couple of weeks ago.

But look, as we're reminded all the time, the cure for high prices is high prices. Uh, if you have a lot of people going after something, then more people come off the sidelines and try to give the market those things that are expensive because they want in on the action. Can this stuff get cheaper or is this different? Well, the the other $30 billion question here is chip plants right. Cost even more than these things.

So you don't just rock up and say, oh okay, I'll build a chip factory. You can't do that either. It's, you know, two years to build a chip plant, and we need multiple chip plants to meet the amount of demand that we've got right now. So the problem isn't just a, you know, oh, we can't build enough data centers. It's we can't build enough giant chip plants to feed these data centers within of components. So it's kind of a compounding issue, and there's no real end in sight if demand stays at the current levels, we're just not going to be able to meet it.

So let's go to we want to bring up, uh, a pie chart, uh, as part of this story. Just give everybody an idea and I'll, I'll spell it out for those who are listening, uh, on radio as well. But it is a pie chart and a big chunk of that pie which is in yellow for those who are watching. Uh, right now, 17.1 billion will go to ships and servers. That's the estimate that we've come up with here at Bloomberg, that you've got about 2.8 billion in contingency planning, 2.2 billion, uh, goes to other 2.4 billion is construction, about 3 billion goes to power, 1.7 billion goes to cooling.

And it is disproportionately as you just laid out semiconductors. Right. That's what makes it all sing these data centers and creates, uh, the eye that people are consuming at this point. We go back to you, Tim and I, time and time again, that you remind us that there are cycles. And again, you do have demand, as Tim said, then you have build, then you have excess capacity and then you have, you know, some fallout. Is this cycle likely to be like any other or.

No. Just maybe the duration of the cycle could be different. We've never seen anything of the magnitude of this current cycle. You've got one company that's heading to $100 billion a quarter in sales. At a 75% gross margin. You've got memory chip companies that have, you know, demand for the next several years already locked up. So there's never been anything like this in terms of the magnitude, in terms of how long it'll go.

If I knew that, I wouldn't be sat here talking to you. But but you do remind us that there are it's cyclical. Right? There's nothing to make you think that this is going to be any different this time around. I mean, the industry has always, always overbuilt, right? We've always had this lag between supply and demand. We've never been able to match it. Anybody who tells you that this is going to be different is probably not really understanding how the industry works.

It's just a case of when the pendulum swings back. Lynn, I want to bring you back in here. We're talking to Lynn Dewan. She's Bloomberg News managing editor of technology at Bloomberg. And also Ian King, Bloomberg News U.S. semiconductor reporter, both joins us from San Francisco. The story we're talking about is the staggering cost of a single data center from from land to chips. I encourage everybody to read this on the terminal or read it at Bloomberg.com and just, uh, play with the interactive element a little bit because it just shows how these costs add up.

And there are a lot of costs in there that you wouldn't necessarily associate with this with this type of CapEx. And that's where I want to send it to you, Lynn. What was the most surprising element of cost that goes into a data center from your research that you found? Well, I just want to I want to I want to, uh, double down on what Ian said about the cyclical nature of chips in that way. I used to oversee the energy and commodities team at Bloomberg, and in that way.

Um, you know, chips have very much become like any other commodity. Every commodity market and energy market is cyclical. You have these cycles of oversupply and then shortage of supply. And what really stood out to me in doing this deep dive with Cushman and Wakefield and Bloomberg Intelligence is that there is this bottleneck, um, across all raw commodities, not just chips, but natural gas turbines and power transformers and concrete and cement and copper and steel.

Um, the inflationary, you know, nature of the boom, uh, is across the board. Um, I think that was probably the most staggering revelation to me is it's not just about the chips, it's about the costs of all of these things soaring. And then suddenly you understand why some of