America’s Electric Grid Could Throw Wrench In Big Tech’s AI Dreams

America’s power grid may not be able to keep pace with Big Tech’s race to build artificial intelligence data centers.

Private spending on data center construction jumped about 64.5 percent after inflation from Aug. 2025 to Aug. 2026, to an annual rate of roughly $85 billion, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by economist Jason Furman shared in an Oct. 7 post on X. Industry leaders say the power needed to run data centers may be slower to arrive.

“If you want to go buy a gas turbine today, you can’t get one for 2032 because they’ve all been reserved,” National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So everyone’s betting on natural gas, and everyone’s looking to build right now.”

Matheson said the grid can handle current demand for most of the year but will need more power plants as AI data center developments grow.

“I think there’s enough to meet it today,” he said. “If we’re looking forward, we’re going to need more generation.”

“I think access to electricity is likely to be the biggest constraint for new projects in the most crowded markets over the next one to three years,” Christopher Johnson, president of the American Energy Leadership Institute, told the DCNF. “Investment will increasingly follow the places that can build,” he added, referring to areas able to add new power plants and grid connections quickly.

Texas shows how quickly demand is piling up.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which runs most of the Lone Star State’s grid, was tracking about 474 gigawatts of requests from large power users as of June 2026, roughly 90 percent of them data centers, an ERCOT spokesperson told the DCNF. That is up from 63 gigawatts in Dec. 2024, ERCOT data from 2025 shows.

The 474-gigawatt total is more than five times the state’s all-time peak demand, according to Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office.