AI data center boom spurs race to find power

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Tech companies scouring the country for electricity to power artificial intelligence are increasingly finding there is a waiting list. In many places the nation’s high-voltage electric wires are running out of room, their connection points locked up by data centers for AI, new factories or charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.

A mad dash to lock up available power has ensued. The tech industry is pinballing from one market to the next looking for places with the capacity to connect campuses that would consume up to a gigawatt of power—about as much as San Francisco uses. Some requests are as much as four to five times as large as that.

But wires are getting so crowded that some prospective data center customers—which request far more power than other users—are being told they may have to wait until the next decade to get the power they are seeking. Others are receiving less power than they expected. In Salt Lake City, there is a moratorium on larger power requests.

The data center industry considers it closed for business. In Santa Clara, Calif., one of the tech industry’s hometown utilities, Silicon Valley Power, has stopped taking requests for electric service for additional data centers. SVP said it faces transmission and power generation constraints that it can’t solve until the early 2030s.

In Virginia—the world’s largest data center market—Dominion Energy said it is temporarily rationing power to some new data centers until new transmission lines can be finished, even as the utility adds around 15 data centers a year. The growing pains are also sparking fights over how to pay for potentially billions of dollars in upgrades to the grid. In central Ohio, the biggest power