Tony Minella: Demand for AI Data Centers Won't Go Away

Tony Minella, president of investment firm Eldridge Industries, is convinced that demand for AI data centers will only grow and will stay strong for many years. Speaking at the prestigious Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, he stressed that this is not a wave of hype but a fundamental transformation of the economy that requires enormous computing power.

AI as an enabler, not magic

Tony Minella takes a sober view of AI. Eldridge Industries does not believe in silver bullets: AI is not a miracle pill that will solve all of a company's problems at once. But it is a powerful tool of transformation (an enabler) that can radically change how companies work and how competitive they are. That is why Eldridge focuses on investing in infrastructure and in startups that build their businesses around AI. This stance helps separate real long-term potential from market hype and speculative waves. In an era when every second company is shouting about adopting AI, the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff remains a rare skill.

Why data centers will be needed even more

Demand for computing capacity is neither accidental nor temporary. Here is why growth will be durable and long-term:

• Data scale — modern language models require petabytes of data and hundreds of trillions of operations to train
• Geographic distribution — cloud operators are building data centers in different regions, closer to users and to energy sources
• Competition for leadership — companies are investing tens of billions of dollars in the race for the best infrastructure
• Long-term contracts — corporate and government orders are signed for 10–15 years with guaranteed demand
• Capital intensity — building a data center requires $1–2 billion and many years to pay back

All these factors point not to a temporary wave but to a structural change in the economy. Data centers will become basic infrastructure, like power grids or the internet.

The market believes in infrastructure

At the conference, Minella noted that despite the cyclical nature of markets, the strong state of equity markets shows healthy investor confidence. Investors see AI infrastructure as a long-term source of income. This confirms that we are not dealing with a speculative bubble. It is about real, tangible needs of the global economy: needs for compute, storage, cooling and electricity.

What this means

AI will not pass as a fashionable trend, and data centers will not sit empty. Infrastructure investment is a strategic priority for the next decade. For companies that control data centers or supply equipment for them, a long-term and stable market is opening up.