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Silicon Valley & Santa Clara data-center power demand

The market that proves demand was never the hard part. In Nvidia's hometown, the grid — not the tenant — sets the ceiling.

A Gridlas analysis · public CBRE / Silicon Valley Power data · current as of late 2025

Santa Clara is the dense heart of the Silicon Valley market, powered by its own municipal utility — Silicon Valley Power — whose cheap, reliable electricity drew data centers here decades before the AI boom. CBRE puts operating inventory around 489 MW as of H2 2025, one of the most established markets in the country. But the defining number now isn't supply — it's the ceiling.

Data centers already buy roughly 60% of Silicon Valley Power's electricity — about 700 MW today — and the utility projects that load nearly doubling to ~1,300 MW by 2035, which it says will take new geothermal and battery resources to serve. Until that capacity arrives, growth is throttled: vacancy sits at 4.7%, only about 144 MW is under construction (most of it pre-leased), and some planned sites are reverting to plain industrial use for lack of power. Through late 2025, finished data-center shells sat empty in Santa Clara — built, but waiting on the grid.

Why it matters

Silicon Valley is the leading case study for what "mature" looks like: a market where the demand is still there but the grid can't take more, so the next gigawatt gets built somewhere with spare power. Watching where SVP's constraint pushes tenants is a direct read on why the buildout is fanning out to Texas, Georgia, and central Ohio.