Economics of a Megawatt of AI Data Center

by Brian Wang
Cruseo CEO Lochmiller broke down the inputs/outputs with high precision (April 2025 contract pricing and the talk)

Upfront capex is ~$59M per MW of developed capacity.

Roughly half (~$30M) is IT (GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage, etc.).
The rest covers data center build, power plant/generation, and other infrastructure.

Annual revenue (pure infrastructure lease/IaaS layer) is ~$15M per MW.
Higher-value managed services/cloud layer can add another ~$15M+ per MW in revenue.

Annual opex is Only ~$1–1.1M per MW (power + other).

Net result is every MW developed can yield $1M+ in annual net revenue as pure infrastructure, with strong margins at the right layers. Payback is attractive (4 years on infra alone)

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