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Kansas City data-center power demand
A flyover metro turned cloud hub — and the place where a data-center boom is rewriting a utility's entire resource plan around gas.
Kansas City spent decades as a reliable, unglamorous colocation market. AI changed that fast. There are now more than 10 hyperscale proposals across the metro, straddling the Missouri–Kansas line. Meta's Kansas City campus came online in August 2025 at 150 MW (a ~$1B investment); Google is building two campuses — a $1B project targeting 400 MW of carbon-free power, phased through 2026–27 — while Edged (~26 MW) and the proposed 192 MW Quindaro DC, on a former power-plant site in Kansas City, Kansas, round out a dense pipeline. Cheap land, central fiber, and a utility willing to sign are the draw.
That utility is Evergy, and the boom has upended its plans. Evergy's capital budget jumped 24% to $21.6B, driven almost entirely by new generation, and it now expects retail sales to grow 7–8% a year through 2030 — after two decades of flat demand. It has signed large-load agreements totaling about 2.5 GW, up from 1.9 GW just three months earlier.
How Evergy plans to power it is the revealing part. It has raised planned new gas-fired generation in Missouri from about 1.9 GW toward 4.7 GW, added ~325 MW of solar — and cut its long-term renewable-energy plans by more than 90%. Its Wolf Creek nuclear plant (~1,200 MW, over a fifth of Kansas's electricity) remains the clean anchor, but the marginal megawatt to serve AI here is gas. To spread the cost, Missouri regulators approved a new Large Load Power Tariff in late 2025 for customers drawing 75 MW or more.
Why it matters
KC shows the institutional version of the power workaround. Beyond Evergy's gas build, the regional grid operator — the Southwest Power Pool — approved an accelerated large-load interconnection path that pairs big new loads with dedicated new generation, on-site or nearby; SPP has fielded 26.4 GW of >100 MW load requests since 2020, ~9 GW of it data centers. Where Nashville shows a utility building gas for the wave and Memphis shows an operator doing it alone, Kansas City shows the rulebook itself being rewritten — the queue formally restructured so firm new supply and new demand arrive together. The tradeoff lands on emissions and on ratepayers.
See the full picture. The Gridlas report ranks the markets, maps them against the grid, and includes the underlying dataset (CSV/GeoJSON) — built from public EIA, LBNL & CBRE data.
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