If you’re a data center operator today, you’re likely feeling a familiar, persistent headache: the desperate search for power. This is especially true with the global rush to deploy AI and high-performance computing workloads. But as you try to scale up to meet this demand, you hit a massive brick wall. The power grid simply cannot keep up.
Just how bad is the backup? Across the US, the average wait time just to secure a grid connection has stretched to an incredible four years. To make matters more challenging, utilities aren't handing out power allocations on a handshake anymore. They’re raising the stakes by requiring massive upfront cash deposits and strict minimum contract payments just to stay in the engineering queue.
At the same time, finding alternative colocation space is nearly impossible. North American vacancy has plummeted to a record low of one percent and is expected to remain near zero through 2028. The active construction pipeline of 66GW is already 95 percent pre-committed, meaning that any new space hitting the market over the next few years is already spoken for.
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The easiest solution is to make the most out of capacity in existing facilities. The reality is that you're probably sitting on a goldmine of ‘stranded’ power right inside your existing walls. By modernizing legacy enterprise facilities, many of which are ten to 20 years old, you can reclaim wasted energy, turn it into usable compute capacity and do so without waiting years for a new utility connection.
