Wall Street is pitching data centers as a major real estate bet. The risks are piling up

Data centers have divided America. The ire of everyday citizens continues to increase against a backdrop of enthusiastic and deep-pocketed Wall Street investors betting artificial intelligence is the economic engine of the future. And as data centers that power the answers for Google's Gemini, Meta's Muse, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT spread across the U.S. landscape, the financial firms are attempting to pitch investors on AI infrastructure as part of a real estate allocation that can diversify a portfolio. For the most part, the funds from alternative investment companies promising investors a piece of the physical infrastructure powering the AI economy remain the province of institutional investors like pension funds.