# AI Data Center Construction Costs Reach Up to $39.5 Billion per Gigawatt By Simon Yoon Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/29509 Published: 2026-10-10T11:46:30.000Z Updated: 2026-10-10T11:46:30.000Z Section: Technology > Estimated capital spending ranges from $34.6 billion to $39.5 billion, with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems at the high end and OpenAI’s Jalapeno ASIC architecture lower. Building a 1-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center is estimated to require between $34.6 billion and $39.5 billion in capital spending, with costs varying by accelerator architecture. Nvidia’s Vera Rubin architecture has the highest projected construction cost among the systems examined. OpenAI’s internally developed Jalapeno application-specific integrated circuit architecture ranks lower. The projected cost of a single Nvidia Rubin NVL72 rack was reduced to $7.52 million from $9.1 million, a decline of about 17%. The revision reflects updated expectations for high-bandwidth memory prices and NAND storage capacity. The estimates highlight the scale of AI infrastructure investment, which has also been examined in [prior projections for AI infrastructure spending](). For data center operators, the main economic burden is capital spending and the depreciation it generates rather than electricity costs. ## Links in this article - [prior projections for AI infrastructure spending](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/technology/24280)