[NEW YORK] Alphabet’s Google is investing an additional US$9 billion in Virginia till 2026 to enhance cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure across the state, marking the latest in a series of big tech investments in US data centres.
The money will go towards building a new data centre in Chesterfield County and expanding existing campuses in Loudoun and Prince William counties, the company said on Wednesday (Aug 27).
A slew of major technology companies are rushing to build data centres in the US, citing a need to sustain the massive AI boom. They are also showing that they are making investments domestically amid US President Donald Trump’s nationalist policies to propel the US to the forefront of the global AI race.
Google’s commitment to expanding AI infrastructure follows similar commitments from other technology companies, with Microsoft, Amazon.com, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms, expected to spend hundreds of billions this year altogether, much of it on AI-related expenditures. Google raised its annual capital expenditures guidance by US$10 billion to US$85 billion in its last quarterly earnings report.
It can take as many as seven years to power up a new data centre in Virginia, which is home to many of them. The company has not committed to a timeline for its Chesterfield data centre to be operational, a spokesperson said, adding that data centre projects typically take 18 to 24 months to complete. Dominion Energy will be its power partner.
Google framed its decision as an investment in Virginia. It is also working with local partners in the state on solutions for growing energy capacity demand, including efficiency programmes and innovation. The company also committed US$1 billion on Aug 6 to enable all Virginia-based college students to have access to the Google AI Pro plan and AI training for a year, free of cost.
Meta’s data centre expansion in rural Louisiana is going to cost around US$50 billion, according to Trump, and JPMorgan Chase and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group are leading a loan of more than US$22 billion to support Vantage Data Centers’ plan to build a massive data-centre campus.
The data centres in the US have largely been concentrated in northern Virginia, nicknamed “Data Center Alley”, since the initial cloud buildout in the early 2000s. Loudoun County, the wealthiest county in the US and home to two of Google’s data centres, is at the centre of the current boom. BLOOMBERG
