Sherwood News

The AI infrastructure debate’s heating up, as spending on data centers set to outpace office construction

Multiple gargantuan data center projects got announced this week — some people see huge risks of fruitless spending, while others, like Sam Altman, think the build-out could be too slow.

Claire Yubin Oh, David Crowther

9/26/25 9:51AM

Depending on who you ask, the AI data center boom is either an obscene waste or not fast enough.

Just yesterday, famed investor David Einhorn cautioned that there’s a “chance that a tremendous amount of capital destruction is going to come through this cycle.” Sam Altman, however, thinks that OpenAI’s hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of spending will “look slow” in hindsight.

It’s hard to get your head around just how quickly the data center boom is taking off, but a viral chart from Joey Politano helps provide context. Indeed, according to Census Bureau data, construction spending for data centers in the year to July has reached an annualized rate of $41 billion — nearly exceeding the construction costs of all private offices in the US.

That’s a whopping 2,200% increase since July 2014.

With such an attractive alternative, investors are increasingly choosing to build data centers rather than offices, a trend accelerated by the shift toward remote work as many offices empty out postpandemic.

Data center construction spending accelerated after ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, and the Census Bureau soon started to publish data center expenditure as a separate category. (Until then, data center was, ironically, lumped into the wider “Office” segment.)

Considering the Census Bureau’s annual spending data covers until the end of July, the data likely does not include the latest construction plans, such as the following, to name but a few, suggesting it’s only a matter of time before these two lines cross:

Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100 billion, 10-gigawatt data center megadeal.
OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank’s $500 billion “Stargate” project, which just announced the first five of its new data center sites.
Meta’s planned “Titan Cluster” data centers.

Jon Keegan2h

Humanoid robot maker Apptronik raises $520 million

Apptronik, an Austin, Texas-based robot manufacturer, said it has closed out its Series A fundraising round, raising $520 million. The fundraising is an extension of a $415 million round raised last February, and included investments from Google, Mercedes-Benz, AT&T, and John Deere. Qatar’s state investment firm, QIA, also participated in the fundraising round.

Apptronik makes Apollo, a humanoid robot targeted for warehouse and manufacturing work. The company is one of several US robotics companies that are racing to apply generative-AI breakthroughs to humanoid robots, in anticipation of a new market for robots in homes and workplaces.

Apptronik Raises $520 Million in New Funding to Build More Humanoids

Ives: Microsoft and Google’s giant capex plans are worth it

Don’t mind the AI sell-off, says Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who thinks fears around seemingly unfettered Big Tech capex budgets are unfounded, especially in the case of Microsoft and Google. Together, the two hyperscalers are slated to spend around $300 billion on the purchases of property and equipment this year as they double down on AI infrastructure, but he says both have already shown that they can turn the spending into revenue and growth.

“They are reshaping cloud economics around AI-first workloads that carry higher switching costs, deeper customer lock-in, and longer contract durations than before,” Ives wrote, adding that these giant costs will be spread out over time and set the companies up for success in the long run. Per Ives:

“While near-term free cash flow optics remain noisy, the platforms that invest early and at scale are best positioned to capture durable share, pricing power, and ecosystem control as AI workloads mature. Over time, we expect utilization leverage to turn today’s elevated investment into a meaningful driver of long-term value creation.”

How the Big Tech companies are spending their huge capex budgets

“While near-term free cash flow optics remain noisy, the platforms that invest early and at scale are best positioned to capture durable share, pricing power, and ecosystem control as AI workloads mature. Over time, we expect utilization leverage to turn today’s elevated investment into a meaningful driver of long-term value creation.”

Jon Keegan24h

Meta reportedly expands Hyperion data center site, purchasing an additional 1,400 acres

Construction is humming along on at Meta’s gargantuan Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana.

And Meta is seemingly already moving ahead with plans to greatly expand the site.

A new report from Forbes revealed that Meta has purchased an additional 1,400 acres adjacent to the construction site, increasing the overall size of the project by 62%. The massive size of the site is nearly 5 miles long and 1 mile wide.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the site “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

Meta is quietly expanding its $10 billion Hyperion AI data center, now sprawling to four times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park | Fortune

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the site “will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.”

$290K

Rani Molla2/10/26

Tesla has been quoting the price of its long-awaited long-range Semi truck at $290,000, Electrek reports. The $290,000 price point represents a significant increase from the original $180,000, roughly 60% higher. However, it’s still well below the industry average for Class 8 electric semi trucks. California Air Resources Board data shows that the average cost of a zero-emission Class 8 truck was $435,000 in 2024, meaning Tesla is undercutting competitors by about $145,000.

On its last earnings call, Tesla said it would start production on the “designed for autonomy” electric commercial truck this year.