In a recent interview to Bloomberg, Brookfield Asset Management’s CEO, Bruce Flatt has shared that the data center industry will grow at an unprecedented rate, and that there will be a marked increase in investments in data centers in wake of DeepSeek’s emergence as a global game changer.
“Increasingly today, the world is digitalising, and the final step of all that, is providing compute capacity,” Flatt told Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua in London in a sit-down interview. Flatt sees the post-DeepSeek world as one filled with opportunities for organizations such as his. “We provide the backbone of all of that. We are providing the green power, the data centers, the compute capacity, we are funding all of that,” he said.
Brookfield Asset Management is a global alternative asset manager, headquartered in New York, with over US$1 trillion of assets under management across renewable power & transition, infrastructure, private equity, real estate, and credit. It has made strategic investments in data centers as an asset class in APAC, EU, South Asia and the Americas.
Readers would recall that earlier this year, DeepSeek, a Chinese Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up that develops Large Language Models (LLM), had revealed that it had trained its chat bot at a fraction of what others like ChatGPT had spent. The stark difference: US$ 6 million for training DeepSeek’s V3 model, compared to US$ 100 million by Open AI’s ChatGPT 4, sent shockwaves across the world. GPU manufacturer NVIDIA’s stock prices took a huge hit, and many other developers of more affordable AI options started emerging, changing the global technology landscape.
But, Flatt sees promising opportunities for the data center industry here. “We are not a competitor of DeepSeek,” he said and delved into how because of DeepSeek’s innovation “probably there is more capacity required, which means they need more of our backbone.” Flatt explains, “As you bring costs down, more useful cases come about. That’s what is going to happen in the next ten years, as we evolve this business.”
Already technology giants have announced big billion dollar investments into AI, especially AI ready data centers across the world. Perhaps the most ambitious of these is America’s Stargate project which brings together the technology and financial might of OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and investment firm MGX. The venture plans on investing up to US$500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States by 2029.