Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in May 2024 that power will be one of the biggest factors that will constrain artificial intelligence, and, true enough, tech giants and hyperscalers have begun to hit power constraints. According to SemiAnalysis, electricity loads of tens of gigawatts have been requested in the state of Texas alone, but only a little over a gigawatt has received approval, signalling that the power grid may be stretched thin.
However, this doesn’t mean that companies are ditching dreams of building massive AI data centers across the globe. Instead, they’re looking at alternative power sources to bring their projects online, regardless of the availability of power from the grid.
This limitation has tech and power companies investing in small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which can potentially deliver large amounts of power in a relatively compact package. Microsoft has even recommissioned the old Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to deliver 819 MW of power for AI and cloud data center usage.
These initiatives will take years to take off, though. The Three Mile Island plant is expected to be operational only by 2028, while the earliest SMRs won’t enter service until the 2030s. There has even been a proposal to use retired U.S. Navy reactors for data centers, but the project proponent hasn’t offered a timeline for how quickly it could potentially get up and running.
Gas generators solve the problem
Elon Musk was the first to use gas turbine generators to power a data center at this scale and duration at xAI’s Memphis Supercluster. In 2024, the AI startup signed a 50-MW deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which only became operational months after.
Aside from the delay, this is nowhere near enough of the 155MW that the 100,000 H100 GPUs running on the site require. There was also a 150-MW substation under construction on the site, which also required additional setup. Waiting for these power sources to come online would have negated Musk’s historic 19-day setup of an AI data center, so he turned to VoltaGrid to deliver the power he needed to run the Colossus site.
(Image credit: VoltaGrid / YouTube)
Just a few months later, OpenAI followed the billionaire’s lead and ordered 29 gas turbines capable of producing 34MW each for its Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas. All these turbines would output a total of 986MW of power, which should be enough to run up to half a million GB200 NVL72 chips. So, even if the company fails to secure power from the grid, it can get the needed electricity from its own turbines.
Aside from these two, several other projects are going off-grid, with 62% of data centers considering on-site power generation, according to Data Center Knowledge. Furthermore, Natural Gas Intel estimated that data centers will use 35GW of behind-the-meter power by 2030.
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