We toured an AI data center to see how our stock names make these facilities work

An important development from the financial markets: The part of artificial intelligence that often gets overlooked lives inside data centers like CoreSite's sprawling complex just outside New York City. CEO Juan Font thinks of his company's facilities like shopping malls. "You have multiple stores sharing the same building, the same power, the same cooling, but in the digital sense, as opposed to having every company build their own data centers," Font told CNBC during a recent tour of CoreSite's NY3 facility in Secaucus, New Jersey.

AI-optimized data centers like NY3 are popping up all around the country as technology companies crave more and more high-powered computing capacity to run their artificial intelligence workloads. They are the physical manifestation that enables the everyday tasks that we conduct on smartphones, computers, wearables, and connected cars. Big Tech — including portfolio names Amazon , Alphabet , Meta Platforms , and Microsoft — has already poured billions upon billions of dollars into data center buildouts.

Economic Details

Collectively, these four companies are on track to spend at least $608 billion this year to keep in the AI arms race. That number may move even higher after all four companies report earnings after Wednesday's closing bell. On top of all that, newcomers OpenAI and Anthropic are also spending at furious clips ahead of their expected initial public offerings (IPOs), which could happen, at the earliest, near the end of this year.

You have multiple stores sharing the same building, the same power, the same cooling, but in the digital sense. CoreSite CEO Juan Font For these complex, power-hungry data centers to operate, an ecosystem of technologies must come together. This new AI infrastructure gold rush is creating massive opportunities for Investing Club names tied to major parts of these facilities.

To better understand how data centers are built and how some of our holdings — from top chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom to leading energy generator GE Vernova — come into play, I took an in-depth tour of CoreSite's Secaucus facility. I also spoke with executives at Amazon and another facility designer, Prime Data Centers (no relation to Amazon's subscription service Prime). Here's what I learned.

Analyst Views

Power It starts with power. "The innermost loop of this intelligence revolution is power," CoreSite's Font said as we walked through his company's Secaucus facility. CoreSite is owned by communications real estate investment tru s t (REIT) American Tower , and operates 30 data centers in 11 markets across the U.

Before installing a single piece of technology, data center developers source electricity as the first and most critical step of the process. (Energy is also the base layer of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's "five-layer cake" of AI . ) "If we go back three years, would be coming to us and saying, 'Do you have 10, 20, 30 megawatts?

Financial markets are tracking the development closely as investors assess the likely impact.