Anthropic's IPO is rumored to be $2T. For the sake of argument let's round it up to 10T to account for openai and any post IPO pop. For the sake of argument let's also assume the US government straight up expropriates any stake existing shareholders have. With those rosy assumptions, you get a whopping $29.4k per American. That's a nice stimmy check (but beware inflation!), but that's less than 2 years of federal government expenses.
But if they do this in shit hole states were nobody wants to live in the first place it could work.
Is it proximity to the city power grids and fiber backbones?
Seems that would be solvable then land is trivial if they go somewhere without objetors
One going up near me is being built on the site of an old coal fired power plant. Lots of juice and an old dam for water. Theres not exactly 2000 cores of fiber out that way, but I am sure it will come eventually.
Theres some going into old paper mills and logging camps too, same sort of thing, near water, lots of juice, out of the way.
*Sometimes theres a simultaneous fibre buildout, or they are built where theres a lot passing through but its less of a concern afaik.
This depends a lot on the datacenter. Some are sited specifically around proximity to existing fiber, or more especially proximity to places where multiple fiber backbones intersect (e.g. carrier hotels / meet-me-rooms). There's a datacenter going up here in Reno to that exact effect, with a lot of the public complaints being “but why do we need a datacenter in the middle of town?” even though:
1) that's where multiple fiber backbones intersect
2) it's being built in a mixed commercial/industrial zone with other datacenters already there
3) the company building it has another datacenter dead smack in the middle of Downtown doing similar carrier hotel stuff, and the new one is an extension of that
And obviously with it tons of skilled labor and people that would have to live somewhere.