The business risk map for AI infrastructure

Why the fastest industrial buildout in a generation will test the limits of capital, contracts, and execution

In the middle of the west Texas steppe, a new kind of industrial complex is rising. Gas turbines roar alongside rows of wind towers. Battery containers hum in the heat. In the data hall, racks of GPUs glow. Each of them is worth more than a mid-size car, and they crunch through AI training runs that can last for weeks without pause.

It’s a frontier market in every sense. Permitting is fast, energy is cheap, land is plentiful, and capital is flooding in. Developers are locking down parcels and power before competitors can. Every week brings another press release about a 200-, 300-, even 500-megawatt campus coming online.

But there’s a reason that the smart money is already mapping the downside. These projects are not simple tech builds. They are stitched together from four different industries—real estate, power generation, grid operations, and high-performance computing—each with its own failure modes. The capital stacks are deep, the counterparties are often meeting for the first time, and the timelines are brutal.

In that environment, the biggest threats to returns aren’t AI regulation or whether GPT-6 delivers on the hype. They’re operational and contractual risks that have already bankrupted projects in energy, infrastructure, and telecom, and they’re baked into the DNA of this boom.

Here’s the emerging business-risk map for AI infrastructure.