The demand for compute 20 years from now will be astronomically higher than supply today. The demand for power and permitted land with grid interconnections 20 years from now will be astronomically higher, making these physical bottlenecks highly resilient assets, even though the servers inside them evolve so the data centres will need some upgraded (at a far lower rate than the chips, which aren't part of the leaseouts by Brookfield). (*)



(*)Brookfield typically provides "powered shells" or fully fitted data centers. They supply the space, the power, and the cooling. The tenant (Microsoft, AWS, Google) buys, installs, and owns the actual servers and chips.


Although the winners in the AI race are hard to identify with certainty, and the profit margin available may be low with lots of competition, it is hard to imagine anything that is going to be more certainly in demand than powered data centres.

Clients like Microsoft and Google may take a big hit if profits from AI disappoint, but they are not going to go bankrupt, and even if they did, I am pretty sure that BN will have built into their contracts some provision for taking over the data centres they are financing, and keeping the asset which will remain valuable no matter which software companies win the AI war.

If the current BN share price is being suppressed by worries about AI, then this seems like a great opportunity to add exposure to BN.

Regards, DTB