Look at the bill, not the demo.

Global data center electricity consumption is on track to hit 460-490 TWh in 2025 — about 1.5% of global electricity. By 2028, Lawrence Berkeley projects US data centers alone will draw 12% of the country's power. Capital expenditure across the five largest tech companies surged past $400B in 2025 and is forecast 75% higher in 2026.

Accelerated servers — the GPU clusters running training and inference — account for nearly half of net data center electricity growth, even though they're a minority of the floor space. They scale at ~30% annually. Conventional servers scale at ~9%.

§ 01 The constraint nobody talks about

The interesting story isn't "AI uses a lot of power." It's that interconnect queues at utilities have become the new GPU shortage. Sites approved in 2024 are coming online in 2027. The companies that secured power-purchase agreements years ago are the ones training the largest models in 2026.

The next bottleneck isn't compute. It's substations.