Topic
Electricity use by data centers, especially large AI campuses, now rivaling utility-scale grids and shaping power generation and siting decisions.
Fervo Energy is selling 33 MW from Cape Station in Utah to the grid, the first utility-scale next-generation geothermal plant to do so, Canary Media reported. The unit has only just started ramping up, so there is no long-run output record yet.
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Wood Mackenzie found four-hour battery storage costs less than open-cycle gas turbines in all 43 markets it studied, across every continent. It expects battery costs to keep falling for decades while gas-turbine power gets more expensive.
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Black Hills will spend $1.8 billion on 564 MW of gas generation for Google's Cheyenne data center, with Google covering the full cost. The utility owns about a fifth of the site's supply, and its payoff depends on how long that one customer keeps drawing power.
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Grow NELA's Rob Cleveland told a Dallas panel that his region's 15-day permit draws data center developers who wait a year or more elsewhere. The session urged early engagement with wary towns, yet credited permit speed over community sentiment as the real draw.
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Oracle says it will absorb about $300 million in rising Point Beach nuclear power costs for more than 1 million Wisconsin utility customers. The pledge needs state regulators' approval and would make Oracle a party to the plant's power deal while it builds a data center in Port Washington.
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JLL says speed to power now drives US site selection, with grid connection waits in major markets topping four years. Parcels on old transmission corridors can now take tenants that identical land next door cannot, AI or otherwise.
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Campuses in Texas and Ohio are pursuing up to 27 gigawatts between them, against an average draw of about 36 gigawatts for all US data centers in 2025. For buyers of that capacity, the open budget line is the new-generation cost Indiana lawmakers want developers to share.
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TrendForce projects 490.7 GW of data center power demand by 2030 against 222.6 GW of available grid capacity, a shortfall of about 268 GW. On the forecaster's own numbers, grids would carry about 45% of the load cloud providers are spending to build.
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NextEra Energy could meet its 15 GW data-center hub goal for 2035 with eight of the roughly 30 sites it is discussing, if each takes 2 GW. Hyperscalers supplied about 30% of recent additions to its 35.1 GW backlog, so a handful of hub contracts will set how far that share rises.
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Energy Department grants of $1.9 billion will fund 31 projects in 26 states promising more than 23 gigawatts from existing power lines. The gains come from weather sensors and rerouting, so they help data center plans most where a congested line is the bottleneck.
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Mazama Energy has $135 million to push a well at Oregon's Newberry site toward rock at 750F. The technology's first outside test is a generation demonstration at 15 megawatts per well, and the company is still seeking certification of the 10 gigawatt claim on the site.
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Google flies one server's worth of TPUs on 1 kilowatt of solar power on Oct. 1, its first hardware test for orbital AI data centers. The flight tests chip survival and cooling while SpaceX's and Blue Origin's far larger constellations still wait on FCC review.
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The government told the National Assembly that the Encinal combined-cycle project in Texas should return $43bn to $45bn over 20 years. People Power Party lawmakers left the closed-door briefing asking who buys the power.
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Energy Department grants of $1.9 billion across 31 projects aim to add more than 23 gigawatts of capacity to existing power lines. Recipients add $3.35 billion, putting the all-in cost near $228 a kilowatt for wire capacity that still needs power plants behind it.
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Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh's $800 billion adds up mortgages, syndicated loans and project debt across AI's physical infrastructure, and he says loans going bad there would cut what banks can lend everyone else.
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ENRG began trading on NYSE Arca on September 22 holding 25 to 50 names. The rising data-center electricity demand behind the pitch reaches that book through uranium, copper and pipeline tolls. Two-thirds of its oil and gas producers are American.
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The Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment will spend about three months asking a citizen panel how much nuclear power Korea should build. Until that answer lands, the generation mix to 2040 stays unsettled.
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Currence.ai counts $26bn of climate tech venture money in the first half of this year, 55% more than a year earlier, and the investors writing the cheques say data-center demand moved it while carbon management funding fell.
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A Form D filed on September 17 counts an earlier $150,000 SAFE conversion inside that total, and what it funds is a physics-based twin that recommends cooling setpoints an operator still has to accept.
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The emirate's energy chairman says population growth, industry and AI infrastructure are pulling on the same grid, and the spending works out near 30 billion dirhams a year while desalination moves onto electricity.
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Leadership · August 28, 2026 · One report1 publisher
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