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REUTERS, New York

Artificial intelligence is squeezing the planet’s resources. Serious questions have yet to be answered about whether there’s enough labor, copper, water and other basics to build and operate all the data centers now under consideration. Even if AI titans manage to solve these problems, there’s an even bigger and stickier supply matter to work out: money.

Large-language hoopla ushered in the new year, ​picking up where it left off in 2025. Standing in an 800,000-square-foot warehouse, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves on January 8 unveiled what he called the single-biggest investment in state history, a $20 billion project by ‌Elon Musk’s xAI for a sprawling complex with nearly 2 gigawatts of computing power. All told, more than 50 GW of such US projects have been announced, according to a running tally being kept by Barclays analysts, with a similar figure touted across Europe.

It’s a staggering amount of computing power, and one that’s especially hard to comprehend given the similarly imposing financial commitments. The sheer size reflects exuberance over how AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini will upend productivity and economic output worldwide. A closer look, however, suggests it will be exceedingly difficult, maybe ​impossible, to fund all the envisioned expansion.

Data centers are measured by the amount of peak electricity it takes to operate and cool the servers. Roughly 110 GW of such projects are already in the planning stages, at ​least based on tallies from public statements. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, whose company supplies most of the processing power for training and running AI, reckons it costs $60 billion to $80 billion to construct a 1 GW compound housing thousands of server racks. His numbers are higher than most. Using a $36 billion per GW figure from Bernstein analysts would translate into some $4 trillion to pay for all the currently slated data centers. At the ​bottom of Huang’s range, however, the implied outlay is $6.6 trillion.

The ambition eclipses one of the largest public works projects in history. Authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, the US Interstate Highway System cost about $500 billion in today’s dollars. It ran considerably ​overbudget and took more than three decades to complete. AI proponents aim to spend 13 times as much over, roughly speaking, just five years.

Without taxpayers to foot the new technology bill, it will fall to private investors instead. Although AI hype is rampant and 13-digit sums are casually thrown around these days in reference to everything from corporate valuations to government interest payments, it’s an implausible sum to raise in such a short period of time.

Big technology companies pinning their futures on AI are tapping deep pools of money. Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Oracle ​have already committed significant amounts and, theoretically at least, have even more at their disposal. Combined, the fivesome is expected to generate $5.5 trillion of operating cash flow from selling software subscriptions, advertising, cloud storage and other goods and services over ​the next five years, according to estimates gathered by Visible Alpha.