AI datacenter boom could end badly, Goldman Sachs warns
Goldman Sachs warns that datacenter investments may fail to pay off if the industry is unable to monetize AI models, but hedges its bets by saying that demand could also overwhelm available capacity by 2030.
Investors have been pouring cash into datacenters, buoyed by the AI-driven demand for compute resources that has led to a boom in construction of new facilities in the US and elsewhere.
Analyst Omdia said this week that capital expenditure on bit barns is forecast to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030 thanks to AI, growing 17 percent annually between now and then.
But doubts have been raised about just how much return on investment (ROI) will come from the current AI frenzy, with IT firm Lenovo finding earlier this year that many business leaders were unconvinced that AI is worth the expense, while another report claimed that forecasts of future demand are based on little more than guesswork.
"A lot of investors have struggled with the hype and quantifying what this all means," Goldman Sachs senior equity analyst Jim Schneider says in the report, which provides four possible scenarios for how the datacenter game may play out between now and 2030, leaving investors to take their pick.
Half of these scenarios forecast that demand for new bit barn capacity will drop off between now and the end of the decade, while one predicts it will come close to using up the entire available capacity, and the remaining scenario sees demand overwhelm the supply.
The base case, which we assume means that Goldman Sachs Research thinks it is the most likely outcome, is that the balance between supply and demand is set to narrow significantly over the next 18 months, with datacenter occupancy peaking at around 93 percent sometime next year. After 2027, supply constraints are expected to ease up.
Its second scenario notes that many AI applications are currently free to use, and there is no guarantee that users will be willing to switch to a paid model. Microsoft has reportedly been finding it difficult to convince customers of the benefits of paying $30 per seat for Copilot, for example.
If users balk at paying for AI tools, plans for monetization of these offerings will fall flat and this will feed through into slower demand for datacenters. This would result in excess supply, Goldman Sachs says, potentially forcing operators to lower their lease rates.
The third scenario is based on the observation that much of the capacity in datacenters is still used for cloud services and traditional workloads. But companies have been seeking to rationalize or even reduce their use of cloud resources because of growing costs, which look set to increase even further in the near future.
In this scenario, corporate spending on cloud services declines, leading to occupancy in datacenters falling even though AI demand remains steady.
The remaining scenario sees a surge in AI use overwhelm the available supply of datacenter capacity. Applications such as AI-generated videos could see a jump in the compute infrastructure required, the report says, while bit barns typically take several years to construct and developers may be unable to keep up.
Goldman Sachs, which reported record revenue for Q3 2025 of $15.2 billion, up 20 percent year-on-year, cautions that its report is for educational purposes only, and does not constitute an investment recommendation.
In other words, make up your own mind what you think will happen.
On the one hand, it says, if occupancy rates fall due to an inability to monetize AI models, it will get harder for datacenter operators to generate the expected returns on their capital investments, while on the other hand, high demand could see a shortage where owners will be leasing or utilizing capacity as fast as they can build it. The latter would be reflected in their ROI ratios.
Some investors have already started to express concerns, with French multinational Axa telling Bloomberg this week that it is "exercising greater caution on the artificial intelligence build-out" when backing financing for the sector, amid growing awareness of the emerging risks.
The managers of Norway's $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund also said recently that they are cautious about investing directly in datacenters due to the sector's high volatility.
However, Macquarie Asset Management told a different tale earlier this year, when its managing director explained to the audience at the Datacloud Global Congress in Cannes, France, that it liked the datacenter market because it offered a captive customer base who find it difficult to move elsewhere.
Caveat emptor, as ever. ®
