Bernstein Breaks Down AI Infrastructure Costs: Up to $39.5 Billion Per Gigawatt Investment

PANews, October 10 - According to a Bernstein research report, building a 1GW data center requires capital expenditures of approximately $34.6 billion to $39.5 billion, depending on the AI accelerator architecture used. Among these, NVIDIA's Vera Rubin architecture has the highest construction cost, while OpenAI's self-developed ASIC architecture, Jalapeno, is relatively lower. Bernstein has significantly cut its per-rack cost estimate for NVIDIA's Rubin NVL72 from the previous $9.1 million to $7.52 million, a reduction of approximately 17%, primarily reflecting adjustments to expectations for HBM prices and NAND storage capacity. The report also noted that the primary economic burden of AI data centers is not electricity costs, but rather the substantial capital expenditures and the depreciation they generate.