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Electricity companies across the U.S. are struggling to figure out how much demand will actually materialize from the artificial intelligence boom, as the stock market speculates that vast sums of money will be spent on infrastructure to support a big data center buildout.
“There is a question about whether or not all of the projections, if they’re real,” Willie Phillips, who served as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2023 until April 2025, told CNBC. “There are some regions who have projected huge increases, and they have readjusted those back.”
The AI companies are rolling out ambitious plans to build server farms that in some cases would consume as much electricity as entire cities. But the tech industry is shopping the same big projects around to multiple utilities as they look for the quickest access to power.
“We’re starting to see similar projects that look exactly to have the same footprint being requested in different regions across the country,” GridUnity CEO Brian Fitzsimons told CNBC. GridUnity uses software to give utilities and transmission operators a clearer picture of where power projects are requesting connections across the patchwork U.S. electric grid.
