---
id: "2026-10-12-bloomberg-1gw-ai-data-center-costs-30b"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-12-bloomberg-1gw-ai-data-center-costs-30b/"
as_of: "2026-10-13T07:38:00+02:00"
date: "2026-10-12"
date_precision: day
category: hardware-compute
importance: 3
confidence: medium
status: [Partly confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: Adam Bicz
human_review: null
version: null
---

As of: 2026-10-13 07:38 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz.
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-12-bloomberg-1gw-ai-data-center-costs-30b/

# Bloomberg: building and equipping a 1 GW AI data center in Abilene, Texas costs about $30B

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. The building costs come from Cushman & Wakefield and the hardware estimates from Bloomberg Intelligence. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet expect about $750B of capital spending in 2026.

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 165 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 104 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash (training cutoff March 2026): 195 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 134 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Bloomberg: AI Data Centers Cost Billions to Build. This Is Why](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-ai-data-center-build-costs/) (bloomberg.com, press)
2. [LavX News: A single AI data center now costs about $30 billion to build (summary of the Bloomberg feature)](https://news.lavx.hu/article/a-single-ai-data-center-now-costs-about-30-billion-to-build) (news.lavx.hu, press)

## Changes

- 2026-10-13 (filed): Created (morning)

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