Infrastructure, property funds eye data centres as AI sends valuations skyrocketing
Data centres are now as essential to modern life as roads and railways. That's piqued the interest of traditionally infrastructure focused investors like Stonepeak, Infratil and Morrison and even Goodman Group.
If the Covid-19 pandemic taught us one thing, it’s that internet access is an equally essential piece of infrastructure as electricity lines and water pumps.
Demand for data centres had already started to mushroom pre-Covid, after businesses progressively began to move their information into the cloud, but this accelerated during the pandemic when video conferencing became entrenched in corporate and personal life.
More recently, the development of AI such as large language models has led to a further explosion in demand for data storage, and the electricity required to power them. A single ChatGPT search requires 15 times more electricity than a standard Google search.
The largest LLM models have roughly 100 billion parameters, which requires 200 gigabytes to load. LLMs are fed by large datasets, which themselves require storage, can be up to a petabyte (1000 terabytes) in size, and expand constantly.
