Bernstein Breaks Down AI Infrastructure Costs: Up to $39.5 Billion per Gigawatt

PANews, October 10 – A Bernstein research report shows that, depending on the AI accelerator architecture used, the capital expenditure required to build a 1GW data center ranges from approximately $34.6 billion to $39.5 billion. Among them, NVIDIA's Vera Rubin architecture has the highest construction cost, while OpenAI's self-developed ASIC architecture Jalapeno is relatively lower. Bernstein significantly lowered its cost estimate for NVIDIA's Rubin NVL72 single rack from the previous $9.1 million to $7.52 million, a reduction of about 17%, mainly reflecting adjustments to HBM price and NAND storage capacity expectations. The report also points out that the main economic burden of AI data centers is not electricity costs, but the massive capital expenditure and the resulting depreciation.