The windswept town of Ellendale, N.D., population 1,100, has two motels, a Dollar General, a Pentecostal Bible college—and a half-built AI factory bigger than 10 Home Depots. Its more than $15 billion price tag is equivalent to a quarter of the state’s annual economic output. The artificial-intelligence boom has ushered in one of the costliest building sprees in world history. Over the past three years, leading tech firms have committed more toward AI data centers like the one in Ellendale, plus chips and energy, than it cost to build the interstate highway system over four decades, when adjusted for inflation. AI proponents liken the effort to the Industrial Revolution. A big problem: No one is sure how they will get their investment back—or when. The building rush is effectively a mega-speculative bet that the technology will rapidly improve, transform the economy and start producing steady profits. “I hope we don’t take 50 years,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a May conference with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, referring to the initially slow adoption of electricity.

Full commentary : Tech companies pour hundreds of billions into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny; echoes of dot-com bubble.