The Norris Group & White Feather AI · Tsunami Series

In 2026, the five largest technology companies will spend an estimated $700 billion building physical AI infrastructure — not software, not cloud credits, but land, buildings, power lines, and computing campuses. That capital has to land somewhere. It already is, in a pattern that mirrors every major infrastructure wave in American history: railroads, interstates, broadband. Each one rewired where people lived and invested. Each one created a window for those who understood the geography early. This episode is about understanding that geography.

What we cover:

• The three forces driving the buildout. Compute demand grows 4–10x per model generation. The power grid is being rebuilt from the ground up. And the CHIPS Act triggered the largest reshoring of semiconductor manufacturing in U.S. history. All three forces require physical land in specific American markets.

• Where it’s concentrating. Virginia and Texas lead, but 64% of capacity under construction is in frontier markets most investors haven’t found — Indiana, Louisiana, West Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. We walk the map tier by tier and name the anchor projects.

• What happens when a campus arrives. A 1 GW campus brings 1,500–2,000 construction workers to markets that weren’t prepared. Data centers become the largest local taxpayers in many counties. Housing supply in most frontier markets is nowhere near ready.

• Ground truth from the field. We’ve been inside one of these markets since before the crowd showed up, and we share what the early signals actually looked like on the ground.

This is a briefing about what’s coming — not a pitch for what to buy.

Hosted by The Norris Group & White Feather AI | Tsunami Series.

For educational purposes only. Not investment advice.

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Episode

Narrator

Welcome to the Norris Group Real Estate Podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode, we'll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever-changing real estate market, continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge and empowering you on your real estate journey. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends, and success strategies.

Joey Romero

Welcome everybody to the Norris Group Real Estate Podcast. And this week we're bringing you our second in our tsunami series webinars, and this one's going to deal with AI infrastructure and how it's going to change the landscape of America and its real estate. So stay tuned, and hope you enjoy. So I'm Joey Romero with the Norris Group, this is Buddy Rushing with White Feather Investments and White Feather AI, and so this is our second webinar. There you go. This is our second webinar in our webinar series. We will have one more leading up to our tsunami event, and this one's going to deal with AI infrastructure and everything that's coming. You know, throughout our country's history, we've had four really revolutionary infrastructure projects that have changed our country. The first one was the railroads. The second one was the interstates broadband got everybody easier access to things, and the real estate around those hubs became super, super popular and valuable, and the next one is what exactly what we're going to talk about is all the AI infrastructure that's coming, and so when you hear that AI infrastructure, like a lot of people maybe don't know, but it's everything that has to do with artificial intelligence and what makes it actually tick. So, we're talking about compute, we're talking about the power that it, that it takes, the energy, and we're talking about the chips. And so, there's going to be some major, major construction that's going to kind of reshape the map of the United States, and that's what we're talking about today. And so, with that being said, buddy, take it away.

Buddy Rushing

Okay, awesome. Can you hear me? Can everybody hear me? All good. Okay. Yes. All right. I'm going to share my screen, and I'm going to dive into this really quickly. So everybody always asks, like, what is the what is the key to making money in real estate? What's the key to, you know, being able to build generational wealth with real estate, and so on. And the generalized, over popularized term is location, location, location, right? And I will tell you that that is true, but it's only part of the story. A much better, in my opinion, a much better way to look at investing is you want to invest in the location that is in the path of progress. So, a lot of people, they mistake the idea of a location as, oh, it's on the beach, by on the beach, so the location is by the beach, and that's a great location, or this location is by a ski resort, and so that's a great look, right, that's what they think of when they think of location, and I would submit to you that that's the wrong way to think about it. What you want to think about is investing in a location that is directly in the path of progress. What does that mean if you have a business that's going to go into a town and set up shop, like, like maybe it's a, maybe it's the headquarters of Boeing or or Delta or something like that, right? And they, or Amazon, decides to put a headquarters there. You guys remember a few years ago whenever they were doing HQ two, and it's like New York City, like turned the Empire State Building orange for a night to try to get their business. Why? Because when Amazon goes and puts an HQ to somewhere, it brings infrastructure, it brings money, it brings tax dollars, it brings jobs, and with that brings an economic progress that rises up the people in the town, they make more money, they're able to afford food, they're able to afford more housing, right? They can afford cars, and so on. So, when you invest in a piece of real estate, and it's in the path of progress, it's the definition of buying low and holding as it increases. A lot of people also think in terms of land, right. So, I've heard it said before that, like, you take a city, right, and you draw out the roads that go out from that city, and you buy up land along those roads, and then as people move out to the city, and they start building houses in the suburbs, your land becomes very, very valuable, right, so that's an. Idea of investing in the path of progress, so with that in mind, in my opinion, we have the greatest AI infrastructure, or the greatest infrastructure opportunity in American history, and those that are investing in the path of progress are going to reap the rewards, and I'll talk you, I'll take you from high level all the way down to the ground on this presentation, so this is actually this sounds like a silly or crazy thing to say. What if you could see where trillions of dollars are going before the crowd? But it's literally true. It is literally trillions, and we're seeing it before the crowd. Okay, so like Joey mentioned, whenever the railroad, whenever the railroads were put in, it changed the face of, you could make a claim that the railroad infrastructure project was the single most defining technology and effort that turned America into a superpower. It connected coast to coast, it connected, it allowed them to travel through the wilds, it allowed them to move goods and services, and everything like that, and explore the vast resources of America. So, there's actually great documentaries on this, where you can watch that talk about how the railroad system itself, and then later the interstate system turned the United States of America into the world superpower that it is, but where did all the, like, the people that created generational wealth, other than the Arnegies that were making the steel, and the railroad tycoons, which were, you know, one to two to three people who made all the money. It was the people that owned the land next to where the railroads were going, because those railroads brought in goods and people and infrastructure, and so the people that own the land are the ones that became generationally wealthy, right? And that's the idea here. Whoever owns the land near the infrastructure captures the wealth. It's a historical pattern that we see repeating it, and we're already doing this now. We're not buying land, we're buying properties, and we're renovating them, and we're renting them out, and we're holding on to them, and that's what the hype appearing campaign is. Okay, so the purpose of the call today is to take you through at a high level where we see this going, and then give you kind of a little inside scoop into what it is that we're doing, and when june 13 comes around, we dive deep into it, and honestly, I'm, I'm considering, I haven't decided yet, because it is a very, very valuable thing that we've created. We created the blueprint for this. The blueprint for Hyperion is done, it's AI-generated, it's created, and we now have $5 million worth of real estate, and it's, it's the best real estate that we've ever purchased. The blueprint is already created, and I'm, I am considering making it available to people that show up on june 13, so that they can learn how to create that blueprint and then go into whatever market they want to and recreate the success on their own. Okay, first, let's do a little bit of education on what the actual AI infrastructure stack looks like. Okay, so 30,000 foot view, you have the United States and you have China. Those are the two major power players in the AI arms race. Okay, the whole reason that this matters, that there's a national security issue, is because the first country that reaches, or the first entity that reaches AGI, artificial general intelligence, will have the ability to cure cancer, will have the ability to extend life, will have the ability to create massive amounts of abundance in terms of 3D printing and robotics and space travel, mining asteroids, like with AGI, all things become possible, and the first country that reaches that will be ahead of everybody else for the rest of time, because when an, when it, when an artificial intelligence becomes AGI level, it's able to train itself, it's called recursive self improvement. When it's able to train itself, it can now move faster than any human can possibly do, which means no one will ever catch up to it. So the country that reaches there first is the country that will always be on top, and that's something that again that's a belief of mine, but it's not just my belief. This is from President Trump all the way to the frontier labs and the hyperscalers, so that's this is this is societally important, which is why the Trump administration has said that beating China to AGI is a national security imperative. Okay, so it has the heaviest top cover that you can ever possibly imagine. So, why do we care? We care because, like, if you were to invest, for instance, in nuclear generation technology, or in a new type of aircraft, you would run into huge, huge legal hurdles. The FAA, you know, is going to stop you from flying for like 10 years, right? The nuclear you. Know proliferation administration and all that, they're going to stop you from being able to build these things right. We would have had flying cars a decade ago if it weren't for the legal and, and you know, safety hurdles that they have to go over in order to make them fly. The technology has existed, but because the FAA, their job is to keep any flying thing safe, and they have a very, very high bar for what they consider safe, which is a good thing. It's the technology is stymied by the actual legal hurdles they have to follow. Does that make sense when it comes to AI and AI infrastructure, because you have an a presidential administrative top-down imperative that claims national security, all the legal hurdles are mitigated like crazy. Okay, so that's really important to understand from a very, from the highest possible level. But here's how the stack looks. This is what we, the foundation models, are typically what we look. This is a screenshot of ChatGPT. Everybody here should be familiar with ChatGPT. That's what we see on our phones and on our laptops, and it's what we identify as AI. Okay, that's the very top layer of it's called the user interface. That's the very top layer of AI. Okay, underneath that is what's called an inference layer. I'm not going to get too nerdy on this, but basically it's essentially the, the computational power that powers, like, think of it like the brain power that powers your large language model.

Joey Romero

That's the GPU,

Buddy Rushing

yeah. Underneath that is the training clusters that hold the GPUs, the graphics processing unit, that is the reason that Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world's history. Yeah, in the world, yeah. And it's because these h1 100, which is their flagship one, they now have h2 100, and so on. These are your graphics processing units, your GPUs. Those GPUs are what produce the computing power at the inference layer to power the large language model. Okay, all right, that's nerdy enough. Let's move on. The really sexy part is this bottom row underneath, so GPUs have to have a home, right? Each of these GPUs, by the way, is $30,000 cost 30,000 bucks for one GPU, 1h 100 Okay, so you're talking about massive amounts of money that's having to go into these, but here's

Joey Romero

where, and they can't, they can't sell them fast enough, like they

Buddy Rushing

sell them fast enough, can't sell them fast enough. The if you want to have a conversation after I finish my presentation about GPUs and the strategic imperative, or the strategic strategic importance of Taiwan, and of the TSMC, and then the Tara Fab in Austin that Elon's building. That's a fascinating conversation, and also, not for nothing, the Tara Fab, where he's building it in Austin. What do you think's going to happen to real estate around where he builds the Tara Fab? Because that's $150 billion project, right. These things are popping up everywhere. So, let me shift next, though, and I'm gonna slow down a little bit, because this is where it gets really, really important to you guys, and this is what we're already doing, and this is this is the gold mine. And Joey, stop me if I give too much away. I have a really big problem with just just being an open book, and Joey's like, you gotta save stuff for the event, and

Joey Romero

so I'll

Joey Romero

just start muting you.

Buddy Rushing

Yeah, just, just be like, buddy, we're going to cover that at the event, okay? The GPUs that power the compute that powers the foundation models, they have to live somewhere, they have to have a home, that home is in massive physical buildings called data centers. Okay, now these range anywhere from 50,000 square feet to over 5 million square feet. Project Prometheus, or I'm sorry, the Prometheus Data Center, the Hyperion Data Center, and they're all over. I'll go over that in a minute, but the data centers are these massive multi deca billion dollar infrastructure projects that house these GPUs. What's the problem with data centers, or rather, what's one of the considerations? Two considerations, major considerations for data centers. Joey, you can answer this question.

Joey Romero

Environmental,

Joey Romero

the water.

Buddy Rushing

What? No, I mean, yeah, water. So, the water, they need water, because these things run super, super, super hot

Joey Romero

because

Joey Romero

of the enormous power that they drain.

Buddy Rushing

That's right, they pull power, and then compute actually creates a physical heat signature that gets really, really high, and so they use air and water to cool these things, so that they don't melt, so they require lots of water, and even more importantly, lots of power, massive amounts of power, and so what you're finding is when these data centers go in next to a city like in Northern Virginia and they plug into the local power grid, everybody hates them because they drain all the power and then your utility bills go up and there's all kinds of less. Learned from that, so the new generation data centers are actually building their own independent power structures, like the Colossus in Memphis. Elon built two major power plants just to feed that data center. Same thing's happening with Hyperion in northeast Louisiana, they're building these massive natural gas power plants. Well, what is a power plant? It's an infrastructure project, which requires people to build it, which requires, you know, them leasing land, paying taxes, employing, so on and so on. Also, right around that, and this is where I care the most about this. Now that I understand these first five layers, what I really care about is the land and the real estate around where they're building these things, that's where we win. So, here's the scale of this thing. Okay, I want to put this in perspective for you. In 2026 there is, and this number actually is outdated, as of today, there's over $700 billion planned for AI infrastructure development, physical infrastructure development in the United States of America in 2026 alone. I want to put this in perspective. The defense budget of the United States military, which is the most powerful military in the history of the world by an order of magnitude, when you think in terms of destructive capability, the United States military is more powerful than the next 10 militaries combined. All you have to do is look up an infographic on this. It's hilarious, right? We have complete and other dominance of the seas, right? And that defense budget costs around 850 billion to create that apparatus per year. We are on track by the end of this year to reach a trillion dollars in AI infrastructure spending alone, which will exceed the national defense budget. Another perspective for you, the US interstate system, when it was executed, was the largest infrastructure project in the history of the world. Okay, it cost $500 billion and it took 35 years to get there. Okay, 500,000,000,035 years, biggest infrastructure project in the history of America,

Joey Romero

and it's still broken.

Buddy Rushing

And in one year we are spending more, by the way, that's 500 billion in today's dollars, 500 billion today's dollars. So, adjusted for inflation, there is more money being poured into AI infrastructure in the United States of America in 2026 than there was in 35 years of the largest infrastructure project in American history. I want, I want that to sink in for a second, because I know there's a lot of stuff that's being said right now, and a lot of stuff. There's 90 people on this call right now, 90 pairs of eyes and 90 pairs of ears that are listening to this. Most people, especially when they're in the world of real estate, they look back and say, man, if I'd only known in 2008 right? If I'd only known that we were about to go on a 15 year run, if I'd only known in 2018 that we were about to see real estate prices double in certain metros in America.

Joey Romero

Well,

Joey Romero

buddy, you forget a lot of the people on the call did, did follow Bruce, so

Buddy Rushing

some of you guys didn't know, and some of you guys took action on it, and your legacy has thanked you for it, right? Your life and your right, and others heard Bruce say those things and didn't take action on it, and you look back and you say what I'm trying to tell you right now, and by the way, my opinion is fully endorsed by Bruce on AI, fully, fully endorsed. Talk to him about it, and he's like, buddy, yes, that makes perfect sense, right. And Sharon Lechter, also, who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, has also.. I sat across from her table at Cherry Creek Lodge, her ranch, and talked into the wee hours of the night about the Hyperion campaign, and she was like, that's the best strategy that I have seen in real estate in decades. And so I look at this and I say, okay, what I'm trying to tell you is just the opportunity that exists right now. By 2030 Citigroup projects almost $3 trillion in data center spent, so it's 2026 right now, which means that it's only ramping up in the years to come. So real estate near the physical infrastructure. Here's the interesting part about this: they're not building data centers in downtown San Francisco, they're building data centers in rural Utah, in rural Oklahoma,

Joey Romero

maybe

Buddy Rushing

in Northeast Louisiana, right? They're doing it in what's called the digital corridor, which is that Midwest area, where you've got high water tables, cheap land, friendly local governments, and abundant natural gas. So that's where they're putting, and that's where your average home value is half the national average. So take a look at this heat spot, and again, I know that when it's only 23 minutes in. We're doing pretty good. We're going to have plenty of time for questions, because I don't want to give you guys too much of this, because I'm going to do an entire presentation on exactly how we built the high period campaign, how we built the command center and the dashboard, and how we've purchased properties and what those properties are doing. But this is not new. So, tier one is basically, and by the way, I worked with Claude and Maverick to create this. Right, it took me like about six minutes, I think, to create this entire presentation, and I was

Joey Romero

gonna

Joey Romero

spend seven minutes and get us a better map.

Buddy Rushing

Oh, I love this map. Are you kidding me? I love this map. I said focus on the areas, and so anyway, so tier one is where you've got basically, like, you know, this is the corridor here in Northeast Virginia, where it's like there's more data that runs through there than any corridor in the world. You got Project, you got Promethe, the Prometheus Project, right? You've got the Terra Fab and various other data centers that are in Texas. I see 140 projects in Atlanta, they've got a huge amount, and then you've got tier two, which is where they're just breaking ground, or they've just announced that they're going to, and that is, you've got some in North Carolina, here, Utah, Ohio, and then the biggest one for us is is the data center in Louisiana. Okay, I say this to say there are vast amounts of areas in the country where you're going to see this play out over and over and over again, and the people that go in there and buy the real estate around these tier two markets are people that are going to experience 10 to 50% increases in appreciation in rent increases, and so on. Okay, and this is how I know, so this was a thesis, and again I won't go too much into this, but I will hit briefly the reason that this, a year ago, was just a thesis, now it's reality, it's fact, we, I own personally one of the properties, I've helped White Feather members buy another 21 we're in escrow on, you know, half a dozen more, we've got offers out. We're looking at, you know, our next phase for the next 12 months is to buy 100 more of these houses. By the way, if you guys don't know, a 1% house is kind of a rule of thumb in rental real estate, right? If you can buy a house and it can rent for 1% of the purchase price per month, so you buy a $200,000 house, it should be able to rent for 2000 a month or more. $400,000 house, 4000 a month or more. If you can get a 1% house, then typically they cash flow really well. It's a general rule of thumb. We have purchased off of the MLS using bank financing 22 properties in Monroe, Rayville, and surrounding areas around that type here in data center, there's not a single house that we have not purchased. There's not a single house that we've purchased that is not a 1% property. Okay, put another way: every single house that we bought is a 1% property plus. That is unheard of. And we're not buying in C class neighborhoods, we're buying in B class neighborhoods. We're, we have A class houses that are three years old, new construction, a class houses three years old that are one percenters, and the reason is because you have this massive influx of 8000 workers, you have this massive influx of not just the Hyperion data center, but AWS Black Box, which is doing all the fiber, you've got, you know, a lot of infrastructure projects that come along with the metadata center as well, and all that's flooding into this area, and so that's causing rent prices to go up, it's causing home prices to go up, and so on. So, what we did was, we saw a year ago that they were starting to move dirt and break ground on this Hyperion data center in Northeast Louisiana. We knew that we did, we did AI analysis, which we again, that created our blueprint, where we said, all right, we know that Louisiana is a very business-friendly state, we know it has a low tax base, we know that the land is inexpensive, we know houses are inexpensive, and we know that the area of Northeast Louisiana has never seen a $30 billion infrastructure project, so we think that it's going to create a massive path of progress play, and so we went in and started buying. We built our team on the ground there, and we have since then. I'll sell you, we have since then acquired 20 properties, and again, I'll talk a little bit more about that, and we're on track to buy 100 more. So, here's your little checklist, right. This is very high level, and you know you can use this. You can feel free to take this presentation and go forth and do great things with it, right? Because there's more than enough for everybody, even if you guys took this exact model and went and executed it. There's more than enough opportunity for everybody on this call times a factor of 10, so first is you look for the announcement, a hyperscaler. So when I say hyperscaler, I mean meta, I mean Google, Microsoft, Open AI, those kinds of things, right? XAI, those are hyperscalers, any type of. Scalar or government infrastructure project over a billion dollars, right. That's what I would say. Don't go anything under a billion dollars. Why? Because there's too many to choose from at 10 or 50 or 100 billion, right? Like these, if Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, or Google break ground, that's when you pay attention. Take a look at the grids, right? If they require grid upgrades, substation, natural gas plants, or nuclear restarts, then you can bet that not only will it be a long construction project to put the data center in, but they then have to build the power infrastructure. Power is the innermost loop that drives progress in a town, and so when they create massive power infrastructure, and they have a huge infrastructure project. They rebuild roads, their tax dollars pour into the local economy, you know, the local businesses boom. You have to build more houses, more people flood in, right. And so that's a path of progress play. Then you have this like little bump, right? So it typically lasts anywhere between three and five years of the horizontal and vertical construction, where they have to bring in 1000s of new workers, and those workers have to live there while they build the data center, that creates a boom, right? And that's what we're in right now, we're in the leading edge, we're about a year into the boom, and that's why we have a waiting list of renters, like we literally, we buy a house, we renovate it. We have a waiting list of renters wanting to move in before we're even able to finish it. Okay, and that's because they bring in, like, the major prime contractors that are building this in Northeast Louisiana - it's Turner, DPR, and Mortensen. They bring in all of these workers, and they have one person that's in charge of finding them housing, and we've, I've met with all three prime contractors, and the house person that's in charge of housing, it's an ancillary job for them that they don't get paid for, that they are overwhelmed, and they're literally begging for help, and so you've got this two to five year workforce gap where they need housing, and they need it right now, and even after the vertical construction is done, and a lot of those workers leave the baseline of what that town is at is much higher than what it was before they came. Okay, and here is the blueprint, right? So we're getting close to the end here. This is the blueprint that we did. This, we literally, I mean, these are real deals that we did. You can look it up, I, you know, these are ones we have in escrow, Watson, and Whitney, and Mohawk, and so on. These are other ones that we actually have that are, that are rented 2004 Carter Street. If you wanted to look that one up in West Monroe, that's, you know, you'll look up the owner, that's a, an LLC called Hyperion Carter LLC, and that's mine. I bought it for 170,000 I put around $55,000 into it. The ARV was 283 I did a cash out refinance, and so I owe 212 on it. It's worth 285 and I have about 35 grand of total capital that I have still invested in it, and it's rented out for 2600 a month, so my cash on cash return is like 17% These are real deals that we're doing in this area,

Joey Romero

buddy. Separate from the strategy, so the strategy is the blueprint, that's what you're considering, and just, you know, giving away. But this is an actual screenshot of your dashboard, right? Yeah, and this, this is something that we're actually going to do a live demonstration on how they can build their own correct on june 13.

Buddy Rushing

Yeah, yeah, actually, and I'm happy to. We're doing good on time, so if, if you wanted to, after this presentation, I'm happy to share my screen and show you the actual live dashboard that we have that was built by members of our team over a weekend, and now we have the blueprint for not just, not just building the dashboard and all that stuff, but the blueprint for actually going into an area and having the AI, the specially trained AI, just run like take all the lessons learned from this year long campaign we've done and what worked, what didn't, what expectations were met and exceeded, and then layer that on a particular area and identify the ideal buy box, identify the area, and then start finding actual addresses itself. I mean, it's yeah, I don't. For those of you that come on June 13, you're going to see something you've never seen before, and those of you that don't, I, you know, I can't help you if you're not in the room, so anyway. Okay. And then there's it. Yeah, this is it. The, this is just the june 13, the tsunami event. Try everything that you can to make it, depending on how many people are actually at the event. If, if there's, you know, if, if there's time, I will do, like, workshops. One of the things that we're talking about, potentially doing, if we have the ability to, is workshops where I would recommend everybody bring your laptop with you, attend the event, it's a one-day event, bring your laptop with you, I'll show you how to have it active. Really take notes, and then create your agent for you, but then if we have time, we're actually going to do a workshop where we'll show you how to recreate the Hyperion campaign and answer any kind of questions you guys have.

Joey Romero

Industry is changing faster than ever, and the investors Learn AI today will have massive advantage tomorrow. That's why the Norris Group and White Feather AI created Tsunami, the Real Estate AI Summit, june 13 in Ontario, California. This isn't another generic AI seminar. You'll get live demos, real deal analysis, and practical AI workflows you can use in your business. Investors, realtors, and operators, this one is built for you. Tickets are 595 but use the code Toonami, that's T W O N A M I, to get $200 off. Grab your spot at The Norris group.com Hope to see you there.

Narrator

For more information on hard money loans, trust deed investing, and upcoming events with The Norris Group, check out The norrisgroup.com For more information on passive investing through the DBL Capital Real Estate Investment Fund, please visit DPL capital.com

Joey Romero

The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under the California DRE license 01219911 Florida mortgage lender license 1577 and NMLS license 1623669 For more information on hard money lending, go to the Norris group.com and click the hard money.