Land is the AI Compute Resource Nobody is Pricing

Why the best AI play might be the dirt under your GPUs

Welcome to the latest edition of Buy the Rumor; Sell the News. In today’s post, I take a look at the opportunity for AI data center buildouts on West Texas land.

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The best AI play might be dirt

Everyone wants a piece of the AI boom. Some chase Nvidia, hoping $50,000 GPUs stay scarce forever. Others pile into Amazon or Google, betting trillion-dollar clouds will inhale every last H100. A few even hunt for second-order winners such as chip packagers, liquid cooling startups, obscure REITs with spare megawatts.

But almost nobody’s looking at the ground itself.

That’s odd, because this entire ethereal software revolution still needs staggeringly physical infrastructure: watts, water, and land. A single 300 MW AI campus can pull more power than Charleston, SC, and might consume enough water to fill an Olympic pool every hour.

The opportunity? A quiet land transformation unfolding in West Texas. It might be the closest thing to buying American Tower before anyone believed telecom masts were gold mines. Only this time, it’s horizontal dirt, not vertical steel.