Bloomberg: building and equipping a 1 GW AI data center in Abilene, Texas costs about $30B
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
A Bloomberg feature published Oct 12, 2026 puts the high-end cost of a one-gigawatt AI data center in Abilene, Texas at about $30 billion: roughly $17B for chips, $3B for power and $2.4B for construction, among other items.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
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Key facts
- Total: about $30B at the high end for a 1 GW site; includes about $17B on chips, $3B on power and $2.4B on construction (Techmeme’s summary of Bloomberg)
- Sources of the estimate: Cushman & Wakefield gave Bloomberg a cost breakdown for the shell of a 1 GW data center in Abilene; Bloomberg Intelligence estimated the hardware (LavX summary)
- Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet together expect about $750B of capital expenditure in 2026, more than half of what all S&P 500 companies spent on capital projects in 2025
- Data-center memory sells for more than five times its price a year earlier (Bloomberg Intelligence)
- Backlogs for gas turbines, transformers and switchgear extend past 2030
- The US plans more than 60 GW of new data-center capacity over four years, tripling its current total
- Oracle sent a force majeure notice in September 2026 on a large New Mexico data center after a gas pipeline for the site ran into regulatory trouble
- John McWilliams (Cushman & Wakefield) on four companies spending this much in a year: ‘We’ve never seen it’
What happened
Bloomberg (Lynn Doan) combined a construction-cost model from the property firm Cushman & Wakefield with hardware estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence for a hypothetical one-gigawatt site in Abilene, the West Texas town where the first Stargate campus stands. Hardware is the larger share of the bill, and memory prices have risen more than fivefold in a year. Electrical equipment is the bottleneck: suppliers of turbines, transformers and switchgear are booked beyond 2030.
Why it matters
“Dollars per gigawatt” is the unit in which AI compute deals are now quoted. A figure near $30B per gigawatt, most of it for hardware that ages within a few years, explains the size of the debt packages in this dataset and why chip and memory prices drive the economics more than buildings do.
Written from Techmeme’s headline and a secondary summary (LavX); the Bloomberg feature is paywalled and was not read. The split of the remaining roughly $7.6B (networking, memory, cooling and other items) is not given in the sources read.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 press
Press
Changes
- Filed (morning)