Powering AIThe U.S. Data Center Buildout Report

Why the AI buildout is now a power problem

For most of the last decade the binding constraint on large-scale computing was silicon. It isn't any more. What now determines where — and how fast — AI capacity gets built is electricity: how much a region has, how quickly new supply can be connected, and whether the transmission exists to move it.

How much power the buildout actually needs

Estimates disagree, and the spread matters more than any single headline number. LBNL and DOE put U.S. data-center consumption at 6.7–12% of national electricity by 2028, or roughly 74–132 GW. EPRI's 2026 analysis projects 9–17% by 2030 — about 60% above its own 2024 estimate. Across all published models, 2030 U.S. forecasts span roughly 200 to over 1,050 TWh per year, a fivefold spread. We publish the range rather than pick a winner; every figure here traces to a public primary source and is documented in the methodology.

The bottleneck is the queue, not the power plants

The U.S. is not short of proposed generation. It is short of connected generation. The median wait to plug a new project into the grid has roughly doubled, to about 4.5–5 years depending on the dataset. And most queued capacity is never built at all: of everything that requested interconnection between 2000 and 2019, just 13% had been built by the end of 2024, while 77% was withdrawn. The queue behaves as an attrition filter, not a build pipeline. Compute scales in months; interconnection scales in years. Read the full breakdown →

Demand lands on specific grids

Supply is spread across 2,459 utility-scale plants, but demand concentrates. Northern Virginia alone operates about 4,040 MW — more data-center capacity than any market on Earth. In Texas, roughly 226 GW sits in the ERCOT queue, around 77% of it data centers. Those are the grids where the collision happens first. See all 16 regional deep-dives →

What operators do while they wait

Rather than wait out the queue, developers increasingly route around it — behind-the-meter gas, nuclear power purchase agreements and restarts, and small modular reactors. The queue's composition is shifting to match: total volume fell about 12% in 2024 as withdrawals outpaced new requests, even as natural gas surged 72% to 136 GW. How the workarounds actually work → And there is a second constraint behind the first — cooling water, much of it demanded in already high-water-stress regions.

New to the terminology? The glossary defines interconnection queue, behind-the-meter, PUE, WUE, curtailment and more — in plain English, with sources.