Last year, hedge fund whisperer and founder of the firm Praetorian Capital, Harris Kupperman, issued a blistering financial analysis on the data center frenzy sweeping across the United States.
Kupperman’s diagnosis was blunt: because data center components break down so quickly, the industry would need to see some $1 trillion in revenue across 2025 and 2026 just to cover the costs of their hyperscale facilities, let alone start turning a profit. With AI revenue today accounting for only a small fraction of that total, Kupperman’s argument is that the financial logic behind the data center buildout simply doesn’t hold up.
But as the last year has shown us, the magnates of the AI industry — and their funders — have a remarkable knack for kicking the can down the road, no matter how bad the numbers might look. That being the case, analysts are starting to use Kupperman’s same rationale to forecast what the next few years have in store for data center developers — and the numbers are staggering.
As Bloomberg reports, an analysis on data centers by Bain and Co, one of the largest management consulting firms in the world, found that the global AI industry would have to reach annual revenue of $6 trillion by 2031 to justify the amount of capital being injected into data centers.
