Morgan Stanley sees US data center costs climbing to $49B per gigawatt

Pricier chips, scarce materials and tight labor are pushing the cost of AI infrastructure sharply higher, according to the bank's analysts Building the physical backbone of artificial intelligence keeps getting more expensive. Morgan Stanley now estimates that an all-in US data center built for the Vera Rubin era will cost approximately $49 billion per gigawatt of capacity. That figure reflects a projected $20 billion increase over three years. The estimate comes from a July 2026 report led by Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak. It lands as the largest cloud companies keep committing staggering sums to AI infrastructure, and it suggests each dollar of that spending buys less capacity than it used to. What is driving the bill higher Facilities built around Nvidia’s previous GB200 systems came in at about $35 billion per gigawatt, according to the report. The move to Vera Rubin-era hardware pushes that number meaningfully higher. Morgan Stanley points to a familiar list of culprits. GPU and memory prices are rising, delivery times are stretching out, materials are in short supply, and skilled labor is hard to find. The pressure is not confined to the servers themselves. Off-rack cost...