We toured an AI data center to see how our stock names make these facilities work

The part of artificial intelligence that often gets overlooked lives inside data centers like CoreSite's sprawling complex just outside New York City. CEO Juan Font thinks of his company's facilities like shopping malls. "You have multiple stores sharing the same building, the same power, the same cooling, but in the digital sense, as opposed to having every company build their own data centers," Font told CNBC during a recent tour of CoreSite's NY3 facility in Secaucus, New Jersey. Data centers like NY3 are popping up all around the country as technology companies crave more and more high-powered computing capacity to run their artificial intelligence workloads. They are the physical manifestation that enables the everyday tasks that we conduct on smartphones, computers, wearables, and connected cars. Big Tech — including portfolio names Amazon , Alphabet , Meta Platforms , and Microsoft — has already poured billions upon billions of dollars into data center buildouts. Collectively, these four companies are on track to spend at least $608 billion this year to keep in the AI arms race. That number may move even higher after all four companies report earnings after Wednesday's closing bell. On top of all that, newcomers OpenAI and Anthropic are also spending at furious clips ahead of their expected initial public offerings (IPOs), which could happen, at the earliest, near the end of this year. …