My colleague Berbergen covers AI from San Francisco.

But last month, he found himself a world away from Silicon Valley, wearing a hard hat in the

middle of the Texas brushland.

I mean, having covered tech for a few years, like I would never have imagined traveling to a massive construction site as part of my job.

But that is the moment we're in.

The moment we're in is an AI building boom.

And Berber and a bunch of other reporters had traveled to its beating heart.

A massive new data center being built for OpenAI outside

Abilene, Texas.

When we got there, it was basically just like a massive construction site.

A lot of workers riding around in buggies, a lot of like pits in the ground that they were

digging to lay fiber cables to connect the different data centers.

There were like massive natural gas turbines that were serving as backup power for the facility.

And then there were these eight white data centers that were springing up from the ground.

The supercomputers in this complex will field users chat GPT requests and train the next generation of OpenAI's models.

When all eight buildings are complete, it'll be the size of New York Central Park.

This kind of mega construction project is happening across the country.

Tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building a new generation of AI data centers.

It's one of the costliest building sprees in history.

And for market watchers, AI skeptics, analysts, and investors, this firehose of spending is raising one very basic question.

Will all this investment pay off? Or are we watching an AI bubble inflate?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza.

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