Data center power: how much it takes and how to get it

How much power data centers use

Data center power demand is measured two ways: energy over a year, in terawatt-hours, and capacity at any moment, in megawatts. Both are rising fast. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers used about 415 TWh in 2024, around 1.5% of global electricity consumption. The United States accounted for 45% of that, the largest share of any country. The IEA expects global data center use to more than double to about 945 TWh by 2030, a volume larger than Japan's total electricity consumption today.

The growth is already showing in the data. In April 2026 the IEA reported that data center electricity demand rose 17% in 2025, against 3% growth in global electricity demand, and that demand from AI-focused data centers climbed faster still. The agency expects AI-focused data center power use to triple by 2030. In its Global Energy Review 2026, the IEA found that data centers accounted for about half of the increase in US electricity consumption in 2025, a year in which total US demand grew about 2%.

The best US baseline remains the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report for the Department of Energy, released in December 2024. It put US data centers at 58 TWh in 2014 and about 176 TWh in 2023, or 4.4% of US electricity. Its 2028 range is 325 to 580 TWh, or 6.7% to 12% of national consumption. The width of that range is the honest answer to how much power data centers will need: it depends on chip efficiency, how fast AI demand grows, and how many announced projects are actually built.

At the scale of a single site, the IEA says a typical AI-focused data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest ones under construction will use 20 times as much. Corporate disclosures point the same way. Google reported that its electricity use grew 37% in 2025, its largest annual increase, driven mainly by AI. For a broader view of how AI changes data center design, see our AI data center guide.

How data center power is measured

A data center's size is quoted in megawatts, but which megawatts matters. Three numbers come up in almost every deal.

Critical IT load

The power available to servers, storage and network gear. Leases and GPU contracts are written in MW of critical IT, because that is the capacity a tenant can actually fill with computers.

Gross or utility power

What the site draws from the grid or its own generation, including cooling, electrical losses, lighting and offices. Interconnection agreements and utility queues count this number.

PUE

Power usage effectiveness: total facility energy divided by IT energy. A PUE of 1.5 means half a watt of overhead for every watt that reaches a server. A perfect score is 1.0.

The gap between gross and critical power is large. When Galaxy completed phase I of its Helios campus in West Texas in July 2026, it described the delivery as about 200 MW of gross power supporting 133 MW of critical IT load for CoreWeave. That is a ratio of about 1.5 to 1. The same release put the campus's total approved power capacity at 1.63 GW. Anyone comparing sites should ask which figure is being quoted.

PUE has stalled across the industry. The Uptime Institute's 2025 survey found a weighted average of 1.54, after 1.56 in 2024 and 1.58 in 2023, and little change for six years. Older, smaller and air-cooled facilities hold the average up. Large operators do far better: Google reported a fleet average PUE of 1.09 for 2025. Power is also the leading cause of serious outages. Uptime found that power problems caused 45% of impactful outages in 2025.

Rack density

Density is where AI breaks from the past. Uptime's 2025 survey put the average modal rack density at almost 9 kW, and 82% of operators reported no racks above 30 kW. An NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack runs at around 132 kW, the figure Schneider Electric's liquid-cooling design for it supports. NVIDIA says that as racks pass 200 kW the 54-volt DC distribution used today hits physical limits, and it is moving to 800-volt DC, with full-scale production in 2027 alongside its Kyber rack systems and a target of 1 MW racks. NVIDIA says 800 VDC improves end-to-end efficiency by up to about 5% and cuts copper requirements by 45% compared with 415-volt AC.

Per-system power figures help with sizing. aPanel lists power draw and running cost for current accelerators and servers, including the NVIDIA B200, the NVIDIA DGX B300 and the AMD Instinct MI355X.

Getting a grid connection

For most projects the grid connection, not land or capital, sets the schedule. JLL reported in August 2025 that the average wait for a grid connection in the United States had reached about four years. The supply side is just as slow. Berkeley Lab's Queued Up 2026 study counted about 2,061 GW of generation and storage seeking interconnection at the end of 2025, down 10% from a year earlier, and found the median time from request to commercial operation exceeded five years. Of the capacity that requested interconnection from 2000 to 2020, only about 13% had been built by the end of 2025, and about 75% had withdrawn.

The IEA warns that, without changes, around 20% of planned data center projects could be delayed by grid constraints. In April 2026 it pointed to tight supply chains for gas turbines and transformers, and to project pipelines straining planning systems and holding up grid connections.

Federal large-load rules

Large loads have historically been connected under state and utility rules, not the federal process used for power plants. That is changing. On October 23, 2025, Energy Secretary Chris Wright used a rarely invoked authority to direct the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to standardize and speed up interconnection for loads above 20 MW, including those sharing a connection point with generation. The letter proposed faster studies, potentially within 60 days, for loads that agree to be curtailable, and asked FERC to take final action by April 30, 2026.

FERC took a different route. On June 18, 2026, it issued show cause orders to six grid operators: PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, NYISO and ISO New England. It found preliminarily that their tariffs lack adequate provisions for large loads and directed them to address study processes, cost shifting and financial security, co-location and behind-the-meter generation, and new transmission services for flexible loads. The operators had 60 days to defend their tariffs or propose changes.

Capacity prices in PJM

In the largest US market, data centers are now setting the price of reliability. PJM's auction for the 2027/2028 delivery year, held in December 2025, cleared at the cap of $333.44 per MW-day and fell 6,623 MW short of the reliability requirement. PJM said nearly 5,100 MW of the roughly 5,250 MW increase in its forecast peak load came from data centers. Spread across every hour of a flat 1 MW load, that capacity price works out to about $14 per MWh before energy and transmission charges.

ERCOT and the Texas rules

Texas runs its own grid, ERCOT, and has its own rules, which is why it has drawn so many large projects and why it is now writing the strictest large-load rules in the country. ERCOT told the Texas Senate in July 2026 that it was tracking about 474 GW of large loads seeking interconnection as of June, about 90% of them data centers. For scale, ERCOT set its all-time peak demand record of 91.1 GW on July 22, 2026, according to the EIA, up from 85.5 GW in August 2023.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, Oncor reported 737 active large-load interconnection requests at the end of June 2026, including about 282 GW from data centers. Most of these requests will never be built. The size of the queue is a measure of interest, not of future load.

Senate Bill 6

Texas Senate Bill 6, signed on June 20, 2025, applies to new or expanded loads above 75 MW at one site. Its main provisions:

• A screening study fee of at least $100,000 per request.
• Disclosure of on-site backup generation equal to at least half of the proposed load. In an emergency, ERCOT can direct such customers to switch to backup power or curtail.
• For large loads connected after December 31, 2025, equipment that lets ERCOT curtail them directly during firm load shed and emergencies.
• A new reliability service through which ERCOT can buy demand reductions from large loads ahead of expected emergencies.
• Review by ERCOT and approval by the Public Utility Commission for new net-metering arrangements that pair a large load with an existing power plant.

The commission's draft interconnection rule, published in March 2026, would add $50,000 per MW of financial security before a study, which is $50 million for a 1 GW request, plus proof of site control and disclosure of parallel requests by the same company. Study fees would be $100,000 for 75 to 250 MW and $300,000 above 250 MW.

Batch studies and the queue audit

ERCOT is replacing one-by-one studies with batch studies that assign each project a year-by-year MW allocation from 2028 to 2032. About 205 GW was found eligible for the first round, Batch Zero, as of late July 2026, and study results are due in April 2027. On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the commission and ERCOT to audit every data center in the queue and to deny grid access to projects that fail to disclose ownership, financial, water and community-impact information. The practical effect is to push out speculative requests. A real project in Texas now needs capital at risk early.

On-site and behind-the-meter power

Behind-the-meter means generation on or next to the site that serves the load directly rather than through the utility grid. Some projects run entirely on their own power; more often, on-site generation bridges the years until a grid connection is ready, or supplements it. Cleanview counted 59 US data centers with a combined 90 GW of announced capacity planning their own power in 2026, more than a quarter of all planned US data center capacity. Only about 2.2% of that capacity was operating and 1.2% under construction; about 60% was announced or early-stage. Texas led announced capacity.

The IEA, in a June 2026 presentation, tracked a pipeline of about 47 GW of on-site gas projects for US data centers. Its April 2026 release noted that many remain early, that gas turbine supply chains have tightened, and that AI data centers' rapid swings in demand strain on-site plants.

Gas turbines

The Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, is the best-known hybrid. It connects to ERCOT and, according to permit documents compiled by Cleanview, has an initial 360 MW of on-site generation from GE Vernova LM2500XPRESS units and Solar Titan 350 turbines. The developer, Crusoe, said in March 2025 that the campus would reach 1.2 GW across eight buildings, and that it had formed a joint venture with Engine No. 1 for 4.5 GW of natural gas generation.

Turbines are not a quick fix everywhere. Lazard reported in June 2025 that the cost of building a new combined-cycle gas plant had reached a 10-year high because of turbine shortages and long delivery times, and expected those pressures to keep pushing gas costs up in the near term.

Fuel cells and batteries

Fuel cells trade higher cost for speed and modular sizing. In April 2026 Bloom Energy said Oracle had expanded its agreement to up to 2.8 GW of fuel cell systems for US data centers, with 1.2 GW already contracted and deployment running through 2027. An earlier Oracle installation was fully running in 55 days. The IEA describes on-site batteries as a critical technology for the next generation of AI data centers, both to smooth fast load swings and to let sites act more flexibly on the grid.

Modular builds are one way to match capacity to power as it arrives; see Mod42 on modular AI data centers.

Nuclear deals

Nuclear power appeals to data center buyers because it runs around the clock and emits no carbon. Most deals so far take power from existing plants; new reactors come later. The IEA's April 2026 release put the pipeline of conditional offtake agreements for small modular reactors at 45 GW, up from 25 GW at the end of 2024, and the agency expects the first SMRs around 2030.

Talen Energy and Amazon

1,920 MW from the Susquehanna plant in Pennsylvania through 2042, announced June 2025. The arrangement moves from co-located to front-of-the-meter after transmission work expected in spring 2026, ramping to full volume by 2032.

Constellation and Meta

A 20-year agreement for the 1,121 MW Clinton plant in Illinois starting June 2027, plus a 30 MW uprate, announced June 2025.

Constellation and Microsoft

A 20-year agreement supports restarting the 835 MW Crane plant, formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1. In April 2026 Constellation asked FERC to transfer grid injection rights from another plant to keep a 2027 restart on schedule despite PJM interconnection delays.

Meta with Vistra, Oklo and TerraPower

Agreements in January 2026 for up to 6.6 GW by 2035: 433 MW of uprates at three Vistra plants, an Oklo campus in Ohio of up to 1.2 GW from as early as 2030, and funding for two TerraPower Natrium units with rights to up to six more.

The Crane filing shows that even a plant that already exists has to clear the interconnection queue. Nuclear helps a buyer's long-term supply. It does not shorten the wait for a new data center site.

Demand response and flexible load

A data center that can cut its load for a few hours a year is much easier for a grid to connect. A February 2025 Duke University study estimated that the largest US balancing authorities could add about 76 GW of new load if that load accepted curtailment of 0.25% of its annual energy, about 85 hours a year, and about 126 GW at 1%. During most curtailment hours, at least half of the new load could keep running.

Hyperscalers have started to test this. In August 2025 Google signed agreements with Indiana Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to shift or reduce power used by machine learning workloads during peak periods, after a pilot with Omaha Public Power District that cut ML load during three grid events. FERC's June 2026 orders asked grid operators to create transmission services designed for flexible large loads, and the DOE letter proposed faster studies for curtailable ones.

What Bitcoin miners already do

Bitcoin miners have run this model at scale for years. A mining fleet can shut down in minutes and lose only the revenue of the hours it is off, so miners in ERCOT sell that flexibility. Riot Platforms reported $13.9 million of power and demand response credits for July 2025, from curtailing during high-price hours and taking part in ERCOT and MISO programs, which brought its all-in power cost to 2.8 cents per kWh, or $28 per MWh. In June 2025 the same total was $5.6 million. Riot's chief executive also cited ERCOT's four coincident peak program, which rewards cutting load during the summer's highest-demand intervals.

AI training is less flexible than mining, but parts of it can move, and miners converting sites to AI bring the controls and contracts with them. For more, read how miners automate curtailment as grid assets, machine learning for mining energy optimization and why Bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI infrastructure.

What power costs

Power prices are diverging by region. The EIA's October 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook shows these wholesale averages:

ERCOT North hub (Texas)

$37.33 per MWh in 2025; $33.68 forecast for 2026.

PJM Western hub (Mid-Atlantic)

$60.09 per MWh in 2025; $84.95 forecast for 2026. EIA expects PJM wholesale prices to rise 41% in 2026, the largest increase of any region.

MISO Illinois hub

$46.82 per MWh in 2025; $52.88 forecast for 2026.

SPP South hub

$37.91 per MWh in 2025; $36.16 forecast for 2026.

Southwest Palo Verde (Arizona)

$31.43 per MWh in 2025; $26.36 forecast for 2026.

Retail rates sit well above wholesale because they include delivery, capacity and fees. The same EIA outlook puts the US average industrial price at 8.62 cents per kWh in 2025, rising to 9.05 cents in 2026, and the commercial price at 13.41 cents rising to 14.00 cents. Large data centers usually buy at or near industrial rates, or wholesale plus delivery charges in a competitive market like ERCOT.

Three trends drive costs up. Capacity charges have climbed in PJM, as shown above. Building new gas plants costs more because of turbine shortages. And utilities are asking large loads to post security and pay for the network upgrades they cause, as the Texas draft rule and the DOE letter both propose. Against that, flexible loads can earn credits, as the Riot figures show. A site's real cost per MWh is the sum of all of these, not the hub price.

Choosing a powered site

A site with power on paper and a site with power on the ground are different things. Before signing, check:

• Energization date and MW schedule. How many MW are available, on what date, and in what steps. In ERCOT, a batch allocation gives year-by-year figures from 2028 to 2032.
• Gross versus critical IT. Which number the seller is quoting, and the assumed PUE that converts one into the other.
• Signed agreements. An executed interconnection or electric service agreement, not a queue position or a will-serve letter. Berkeley Lab's data show that withdrawal rates stay above 40% even after interconnection agreements are signed on the generation side.
• Substation and transformers. Who owns them, whether they exist, and the lead time if they do not.
• Curtailment obligations. Under Texas SB 6, large loads connected after 2025 must allow remote curtailment in emergencies. Know how often that could happen and what it costs the tenant.
• On-site generation permits. Air permits, gas supply, turbine delivery dates and whether the grid connection allows export or net metering.
• All-in price per MWh. Energy, capacity, transmission, delivery, demand charges and any credits for flexibility.
• Financial security posted. In Texas, $50,000 per MW under the draft rule. A developer who has posted it is more likely to be real.
• Disclosure compliance. In Texas, the August 2026 audit means missing ownership, water or community-impact filings can cost a project its grid access.

Energized Bitcoin mining sites pass many of these checks already, which is why so many have been leased to AI tenants; see Core Scientific and CoreWeave on physical AI infrastructure and the broader story in our AI data center guide.

The people who own power and the people who need it meet at Intelligence Disrupt 2027, March 22-24, 2027, at the Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas in Dallas-Fort Worth, co-located with Mining Disrupt, the Bitcoin mining expo. See passes or exhibit.

Questions

How much power do data centers use?

The IEA estimates data centers used about 415 TWh in 2024, roughly 1.5% of the world's electricity, and expects that to more than double to about 945 TWh by 2030. Demand grew 17% in 2025, according to the IEA.

How much electricity do US data centers use?

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put US data centers at about 176 TWh in 2023, or 4.4% of US electricity, and projects 325 to 580 TWh by 2028, or 6.7% to 12%. The IEA says data centers drove about half of US electricity demand growth in 2025.

What does MW of critical IT mean?

It is the power available to the servers, storage and network gear, excluding cooling and electrical losses. At Galaxy's Helios campus in July 2026, about 200 MW of gross power supported 133 MW of critical IT load.

What is a good PUE?

The Uptime Institute measured an industry weighted average of 1.54 in 2025, little changed for six years. Google reported a fleet average of 1.09 for 2025.

How long does it take to get a grid connection for a data center?

JLL put the average US wait at about four years in August 2025. Berkeley Lab found the median time from interconnection request to operation for power plants exceeded five years, in the regions with data, as of the end of 2025.

What is behind-the-meter power for a data center?

Generation built on or next to the site that serves the load directly instead of through the utility grid, most often gas turbines, engines or fuel cells. Cleanview counted 59 US data centers totaling about 90 GW planning their own behind-the-meter power in 2026.

Do Bitcoin miners really help the grid?

They can cut load quickly when prices spike or the grid is stressed. In July 2025 Riot Platforms reported $13.9 million of power and demand response credits from curtailing in ERCOT and MISO.

What does wholesale power cost in Texas?

EIA's October 2026 outlook puts the ERCOT North hub at about $37 per MWh in 2025 and about $34 per MWh in 2026, compared with about $85 per MWh expected at PJM's Western hub in 2026.

More guides

• AI data centers: power, cooling, sites and the build-out
• GPU cloud: providers, prices and the power behind them
• Liquid cooling for data centers

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