Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Put the Data Center in the Box

Coffee pod financing

The modern artificial intelligence boom has created a boom in financial engineering. A lot of people who run big tech companies and AI labs think that they will collectively need to spend trillions of dollars over the next few years building data centers to train and run AI models, buying chips to put in those data centers, buying electricity to run those data centers, and building power plants to provide that electricity.

Trillions of dollars is a lot of money for anyone, but particularly for big tech companies like Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc., which started out as ...