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America’s Data Center Capacity Shortfall
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Key Takeaways
- Rapid growth in power-hungry AI models is expected to push U.S. data center demand beyond available capacity through 2028.
- The projected power gap—10 gigawatts (GW) by 2028—is comparable to the electricity needed to power roughly 7.5 million homes for an entire year.
Hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and Amazon are set to spend a combined $325 billion on capital expenditures this year, mainly for data centers.
But this massive spending is being met with constraints in the physical world. This year, data center capacity faces about an 11 GW shortfall. Supply chain pressures, from limited land and grid capacity to ongoing chip shortages, remain headwinds to data center buildouts.
This graphic shows U.S. data center supply and demand through to 2028, based on estimates from Goldman Sachs.
U.S. Data Center Capacity Supply and Demand
Below, we show how data center supply faces a huge shortfall in the coming years:
| Year | U.S. Data Center CapacityDemand (GW) | U.S. Data Center CapacitySupply (GW) | Data Center CapacityShortfall (GW) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 24.0 | 14.2 | -9.8 |
| 2024 | 29.7 | 21.1 | -8.6 |
| 2025P | 38.1 | 26.7 | -11.4 |
| 2026P | 49.8 | 40.5 | -9.3 |
| 2027P | 62.7 | 53.0 | -9.7 |
| 2028P | 77.0 | 67.0 | -10.0 |
For perspective, a large data center is estimated to need as much power as 400,000 electric vehicles annually.
As AI adoption grows, “inferencing” will see higher demand. This is when AI responds to a query, rather than training the models themselves.
When data centers are located closer to cities, it creates faster responses, but there is a shortage of land and electricity needed to support this. Moreover, data center vacancy rates are at all-time lows of 3%.
When it comes to power needs, natural-gas turbines face yearslong waits and long construction timelines. In turn, tech companies are looking to alternative—and sometimes more expensive sources—such as smaller natural-gas turbines that are more readily accessible.
Even so, the data center shortfall is forecast to be 9.3 GW in 2026, rising to 10 GW by 2028.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the world’s data centers.