Amazon Data Center Project Sees 60% Cost Jump
It’s a signal that, despite the cost furor sparked last week when DeepSeek went viral, tech giants are keeping the AI investment fire hose firmly…

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So much for less is more.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that, according to state planning documents viewed by the outlet, a data center project Amazon has cooking in Mississippi will cost $16 billion, as opposed to the $10 billion price tag Amazon published when it announced the project. It’s a signal that, despite the cost furor sparked last week when DeepSeek went viral, tech giants are keeping the AI investment fire hose firmly turned on.
Mississippi Blues
The documents viewed by Bloomberg show that while the company was able to obtain $278 million in state incentives to build two centers, plus tax breaks, its price tag ballooned in large part due to the cost of IT components such as servers and fiber optic cables. The distending collective cost of data centers isn’t just because Big Tech companies are scrabbling to build as many as possible; the cost of components is also on the rise. In May last year, Savills reported that from 2022 to 2023, the cost of global data center construction rose 6%.
But Big Tech companies are signaling that they won’t be deterred from their big spending ways, even in the face of a viral Chinese app:
- Last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that Meta will spend up to $65 billion this year, in part on AI infrastructure. To put that into perspective, Meta has lost over $60 billion on its metaverse division Reality Labs since 2020 — so Zuck’s aiming to surpass the entirety of the company’s historic metaverse spend in 12 months.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trying to take some of the edge off by appealing for more government funding, and held a closed-door meeting last week with lawmakers to urge support for domestic AI infrastructure build-out, Bloomberg reported.
Numbers Game: Last week, the Financial Times reported that SoftBank, harking back to the days when it bankrolled Silicon Valley darlings like Uber and WeWork (that one didn’t turn out so well), is considering investing $15 billion to $25 billion in OpenAI. That’s on top of the money it’s promised to roll into Stargate, the supposed $500 billion investment in US AI infrastructure headlined by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. However, as The Verge’s Kylie Robinson points out, the math on that one is looking a little grandiose, to put it politely.