Texas has 474 gigawatts of requests from data centre developers waiting to connect to its power grid, more than five times the state’s record peak demand.
In 2023, the figure was just 48 gigawatts, and the difference clearly does not represent hundreds of gigawatts of new data centres that are actually going to be built.
The industry has a name for this phenomenon, “ghost demand”, and a Reuters analysis published Tuesday shows how large the gap has become. Across the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and South, data centre connection requests now exceed 700 gigawatts, more than ten times current estimates of US data centre electricity consumption.
The problem is less about developers deliberately misleading grid operators than about the incentives built into the connection process.
A developer can submit requests for several potential sites, keeping multiple options open at relatively little cost, and ultimately build only one of them. From the developer’s perspective, it makes sense to secure a place in the queue before deciding which project will actually go ahead.
