AI INFRASTRUCTURE

“ Inflecting power demand is monumentally important, because it’ s been declining for 15 years in Europe,” says Alberto Gandolfi, Managing Director, Equity Research at Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs estimates the continent needs a data centre pipeline of roughly 170GW – equivalent to a third of Europe’ s entire current electricity consumption.

US utilities alone need to spend US $ 50bn on new generation capacity just for data centres, while global grid upgrades could cost US $ 720bn through 2030.

Frank Long, a Vice President at the Goldman Sachs Global Institute suggests:“ Retrofitting existing facilities to support these massive jumps in power density is becoming complex and compromised.

“ We will need new, purpose-built AI infrastructure to power the next generation.”

The enterprise scaling crisis unveiled While this infrastructure race accelerates, most companies are struggling to even deploy AI. Accenture’ s survey of 2,000 C-suite and data science executives from billion-dollar companies finds a growing gap between ambition and execution.

They sorted organisations into three categories: 42 % are still struggling with limited pilots, 43 % are making some progress with implementation – and just 15 % achieve“ AI reinvention-ready” status.

Within that final group, only 8 % qualify as genuine front-runners who’ ve successfully scaled multiple strategic AI initiatives across their operations.

The first data centres emerge, housing massive mainframes like ENIAC, designed for centralised computing with strict environment control

IBM builds the first official data centre with environmental controls improving reliability and pioneering modern cooling systems essential for dense computing

222 November 2025