AI Data Centers, Desperate for Electricity, Are Building Their Own Power Plants
Bypassing the grid, at least temporarily, tech companies are creating an energy Wild West; ‘grab yourself a couple of turbines’
Tech companies in the AI race need power, and lots of it. They aren’t waiting around for the archaic U.S. power grid to catch up.
In West Texas, natural-gas-fired power generation is under construction as part of the $500 billion Stargate project from OpenAI and Oracle ORCL 1.55%increase; green up pointing triangle. Gas turbines are in use at Colossus 1 and 2, the massive data centers Elon Musk’s xAI is building in Memphis, Tenn. More than a dozen Equinix EQIX 0.59%increase; green up pointing triangle data centers across the country are using fuel cells for power.
With the push for AI dominance at warp speed, the “Bring Your Own Power” boom is a quick fix for the gridlock of trying to get on the grid. It’s driving an energy Wild West that is reshaping American power.
Most tech titans would be happy to trade their DIY sourcing for the ability to plug into the electric grid. But supply-chain snarls and permitting challenges are complicating everything, and the U.S. isn’t building transmission infrastructure or power plants fast enough to meet the sudden surge in demand for electricity.
America should be adding about 80 gigawatts of new power generation capacity a year to keep pace with AI as well as cloud computing, crypto, industrial demand and electrification trends, according to consulting and technology firm ICF. It’s currently building less than 65 gigawatts. That gap alone is enough electricity to power two Manhattans during the hottest parts of summer.
Data centers have long taken power for granted, said KR Sridhar, founder and chief executive of Bloom Energy BE 2.21%increase; green up pointing triangle, which provides fuel cells to companies that need on-site power, often in a hurry. “You build the data center. Well, you just plug it in.”
That isn’t possible anymore given the city-sized amounts of electricity needed to train AI models. One data center can devour as much electricity as 1,000 Walmart stores, and an AI search can use 10 times the amount of energy as a google search.
The growth is intense, too. The U.S. had around 522 hyperscale data centers at the end of the second quarter, which account for around 55% of global capacity, according to Synergy Research Group. Another roughly 280 are expected to come online through 2028 in the U.S.
Data centers consumed less than 2% of U.S. electricity before about 2020, but by 2028 could use as much as 12% of U.S. electricity, according to the Energy Department and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Utility executives compare the skyrocketing demand with rural electrification efforts or the advent of air conditioning, though much of that work happened in the years after World War II when American industry was roaring.
President Trump in January declared a national energy emergency, in part to keep the U.S. from falling behind China in the AI race. He has issued a series of related executive orders including one that aims to fast-track data-center construction and needed power infrastructure.
The U.S. appears to have a lot of catching up to do.
China will invest twice as much as the U.S. this year in power plants, storage and the grid, according to the International Energy Agency. It added about 429 gigawatts of new power generation last year, according to the think tank Climate Energy Finance, while the U.S. built about 50 gigawatts.
The country has about four times the population of the U.S., but with centralized planning avoids many of the hangups in building everything from transmission lines to power plants. Most U.S. data-center developers cited grid access as their top concern.
Project developers and utilities are trying to pick up the pace. ICF forecasts the U.S. will deliver almost 80 gigawatts of new generation starting in 2027, doubling the average pace of the past five years.
Even so, in some locations, data centers won’t be able to plug into the power grid until the 2030s because of the sheer backlog of projects and the fact that the nation’s high-voltage electric wires are running out of room.
“If the grid doesn’t have power and you need to generate compute capacity, what are your alternatives?” asked Bill Stein, executive managing director and chief investment officer with Primary Digital Infrastructure, an advisory and data-center investment platform that’s part of a joint venture financing the construction of the West Texas Stargate site.
Waiting for the cavalry
Many of the data-center developers scrambling for electricity intend to use on-site power for a few years until the grid infrastructure can catch up. A few plan to bypass the grid indefinitely, and others expect to split the difference, using a mix of grid and on-site power.
Ultimately, most data centers and tech customers will want to connect to the grid. It offers reliability and diversification with its mix of power plants—when one power source goes down, another can pick up the slack, said Andy Power, chief executive of Digital Realty, which has 300 data centers globally. He views on-site power as a stopgap.
“We’re not in the power business,” he said. “We’re building these bridges to allow the cavalry to come up with the transmission or other pieces of the puzzle that they may need to provide power.”
It may be a while.
Planning and building large-scale power plants or expanding grid infrastructure takes years. The process, normally gummed up, is even more difficult lately. Projects of all kinds face hurdles obtaining permits, equipment shortages, a labor crunch and rising costs, exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, as well as some copper products.
Orders for transformers began climbing just as global supply chains became snarled at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to data from energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. Data-center demand for the equipment is up 10-fold since then. It’s expected to quintuple next year. New factories and utilities’ efforts to replace aging or damaged equipment have added to the order backlog.
Transmission construction, too, has been bogged down. The U.S. added 888 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines last year, and 450 miles the year before, according to a report from Grid Strategies. That’s down from an average of more than 900 miles a year between 2015 and 2019, and more than 1,700 miles a year on average for the five-year period before that.
As utilities push to increase supply and access, data centers are pulling in resources wherever they can, with natural gas the clear winner.
Massive turbines for large power plants have a yearslong backlog. But smaller turbines, reciprocating engines or fuel cells that also can use natural gas remain available—for now. Companies are snatching them up, adding them to data-center sites like Legos. Enough of them equal the output of utility-sized power plants or nuclear reactors.
In Memphis, xAI’s first Colossus site initially relied on smaller gas turbines to power hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphic processing units. It now uses a mix of on-site and grid power. Colossus 2, currently under construction, will use turbines located just across the Mississippi state line and connected by a transmission line to the site. The electricity required for the sites could power hundreds of thousands of homes.
The Stargate site in West Texas will also tap natural gas to supplement its use of grid power. The campus sits on the doorstep of the Permian Basin, the country’s largest oil-and-gas field, and is expected to have a capacity of more than a gigawatt of electricity, roughly equivalent to the power San Francisco uses.
In San Jose, Calif., at a data center tucked between a Costco and a highway, Equinix produces its own power using fuel cells, which convert natural gas into electricity, and some solar panels. The site, a short drive from the headquarters of many of the tech companies propelling the AI boom, is one of 19 run by Equinix in the U.S. that rely, at least to some degree, on on-site power generation. More sites powered by fuel cells are coming.
