It’s no secret that data centers are slated to bring stunning levels of new power demand to the grid in the coming years.
Report after report has tried to put a number on just how much electricity these facilities will actually use, and BloombergNEF joined the chorus this week. Its report projects that U.S. data centers will consume 20% of the country’s power in 2035, up from 5.9% today.
In all, data centers will consume as much as 194 gigawatts of power in 2035, the report estimates. That’s nearly double the amount BloombergNEF forecast back in December, and it’s more than the firm’s analysts expect the power grid to be able to accommodate.
So what’s a data center developer to do? Well, if you’re Elon Musk, you buy a company that’s operating tons of mobile gas and diesel generators that can provide your data centers with power that’s not connected to the grid.
Federal records unearthed last week by Electrek show that in May, the xAI founder bought APR Energy, a Florida company that runs more than a gigawatt of these portable fossil-fueled turbines. These generators can be installed in just a few days, as opposed to a traditional gas plant, which may take years to build.
This isn’t a new avenue for xAI. Since last August, the company has been using diesel generators propped on truck beds to power its Colossus 2 data center project outside Memphis. A lawsuit from the NAACP and its allies alleges the turbines are running without required permits and releasing tons of pollution that harms nearby, majority-Black communities.
Other data center projects are turning to gas, too, or hope to do so in the future. In Ohio, Meta uses modular gas turbines to power servers that, as of June, are stacked up in temporary tents. Some developers want to construct more permanent fossil-fuel solutions: Google, for example, has proposed building its very own utility-scale gas plant alongside a data center in Nebraska.
But experts are casting doubt on just how much off-grid gas power that tech firms will actually be able to build. Among the challenges: Gas turbines are in short supply, and so is the workforce needed to maintain them, as the clean energy industry veteran Jigar Shah noted in an episode of Latitude Media’s Open Circuit podcast.
BloombergNEF projects that even if the grid can accommodate 7 GW of new data center demand each year — the all-time record — and if many hyperscalers install their own gas turbines, the sector will still face a 19-GW shortfall by 2035. For perspective, a standard large-scale nuclear power plant produces about 1 GW of power, and it’s going to be a gigantic undertaking to fulfill the Trump administration’s goal to build 10 of those in the coming years.
Of course, no one knows for sure just how much power data centers will actually end up needing. Data centers could get way more efficient as their processors improve. The AI boom could peter out. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll unlock the miracle clean power source that is commercial nuclear fusion and use it to meet all our massive electricity needs — but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
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