×
The Global Race for Computation
As of writing this in the summer of 2025, it feels like the world is in the middle of a construction boom that nobody's really talking about. Not for housing, not for commercial real estate-but for data centers. These things are popping up everywhere. Microsoft's spending over $50 billion this year alone to build out infrastructure that can support Al growth. Amazon, Google, Meta-same story. It's like everyone woke up at once and realized the only way to survive the Al explosion is to own the digital land it lives on.
And when I say land, I mean literal land. Thousands of acres are being scooped up across the U.S., Scandinavia, Chile, you name it. These aren't some sleek buildings you see in tech company promo videos. They're massive, power-hungry, water-cooled beasts. We're talking about server factories the size of airports. Places like Iowa and northern Sweden-once considered pretty off the radar-are turning into digital oil fields. Why? Because they've got space, power, and cool climates. All things you need when you're trying to run and cool a building stuffed with GPUs burning hotter than a jet engine.
This is important. I don't think people fully get what this means. This isn't just about making sure ChatGPT doesn't go down during finals week. This is about reshaping the actual structure of the global economy. These data centers are becoming the foundation for a new kind of industrial revolution. One where human labor isn't the bottleneck-it's computing power. Every future business, government, artist, and engineer is going to be dependent on a cloud of infrastructure built right now. And it's not just about Al, it's about everything: logistics, health care, energy grids, education-name an industry and it's probably about to get eaten by a data-hungry algorithm.
There's something poetic about it too. The cloud used to sound like this vague, magical thing. But it turns out it's made of concrete, steel, and wires. You can drive by it. It needs real people to build and run it. It consumes electricity like it's candy. It's messy. It's expensive. And it's absolutely necessary if we want to keep scaling the capabilities of Al.
This is all happening really fast. And the consequences are going to be huge. The places that get ahead on this-places with smart energy policy, fast permitting, and cheap land-are going to explode economically. They're going to attract tech jobs, investment, and long-term relevance. Countries that miss out might find themselves on the wrong side of a new kind of digital divide. A few regions will control most of the compute power, and that's going to matter a lot more than oil did in the 20th century.
Works Cited:
"Big Tech's Race to Find Land for Al Data Centers." The Wall Street Journal, 2024.
"Microsoft to Spend Billions on Data Centers for Al." Bloomberg, 2024.
"Inside the Al Data Center Boom." CNBC, 2024.
"The World's Growing Need for Data Infrastructure." Financial Times, 2023.