← Back to feed

The AI infrastructure narrative runs on announced gigawatts. Microsoft’s $80B. Oracle and OpenAI’s $15B Vantage partnership. Google’s multiyear TPU commitments. The numbers are real. The capacity they imply is not.

Sightline Climate, which tracks data center project pipelines, has assessed 710 projects totalling 102.3GW of announced capacity through 2030. Only 40.8GW of that meets its threshold as derisked — projects with secured grid interconnection, resolved permitting, and committed financing. The remaining 61.5GW, roughly 60% of what has been announced, faces material risk of delay or cancellation.

The New Bottleneck

For two years the binding constraint on AI infrastructure was chips: NVIDIA could not produce H100s fast enough, then GB200s. That period is ending. TSMC capacity has scaled. NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin production is in sight. CoreWeave and hyperscalers have contracted enough silicon.

The constraint that replaced it cannot be solved with a fab expansion or a supply chain deal. Data Center Watch counted at least 48 US data center projects blocked or delayed in 2025 — each one a claim on land, power grid access, substations, cooling infrastructure, permits, construction labour, and local political consent. Sightline estimates that 30% to 50% of large projects slated for 2026 could be delayed because of power constraints, equipment shortages, and local opposition.

MISO, the grid operator covering the Midwest and parts of the South, expects peak load to reach 163GW by 2035, up 35% from its 2025 peak of 121GW, driven primarily by data center development. That 42GW of new load is looking for grid connections that utilities are building on decade-long timescales.

What Derisked Looks Like

A derisked project has cleared the specific barriers that kill the rest:

• Grid interconnection: Formal agreement with the utility, assigned substation capacity. The average wait time in the PJM queue — which covers the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest — now exceeds three years for large loads.
• Permits: Environmental, zoning, and local approvals in hand. Northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the world, has slowed significantly as Loudoun County and neighbouring jurisdictions tighten approvals.
• Financing: Committed construction capital, not just letters of intent. Investment-grade debt like CoreWeave’s $8.5B loan is distinct from announced equity pipelines.

Projects that do not have all three remain in the announced category. Sightline’s methodology treats signed LOIs, capacity announcements, and land acquisitions as announced, not derisked.

The Announced-to-Real Conversion Rate

The gap has structural causes, not just temporary delays. Utility interconnection queues function as first-come, first-served queues that reward speed of application over seriousness of project. Speculative developers file early to hold position, inflating the announced pipeline. Many never build. Sightline estimates that the conversion rate from announced to operational capacity in the AI data center sector is running below 50%.

That figure has significant implications for anyone pricing AI infrastructure access in the 2027-2030 window. The announced capacity would suggest comfortable supply. The derisked capacity suggests something closer to a crunch.

What Changes the Math

Several interventions are in progress. The US government’s nuclear financing initiative is adding 5GW of existing nuclear output to the grid at low cost — material at the margin but not transformative. Some data center operators are pursuing co-location directly on power generation sites, bypassing the interconnection queue. Others are moving to markets with faster permitting: Texas, Arizona, parts of the Gulf Coast.

The structural constraint — that a data center is a coordinated claim on multiple scarce systems simultaneously — does not disappear with any single fix. At 102GW announced and 41GW viable, the gap is the story.

Key Numbers

Metric	Figure
Total announced capacity (2030)	102.3 GW
Derisked capacity	40.8 GW
Capacity at risk	61.5 GW (60.1%)
US projects blocked/delayed in 2025	48 (Data Center Watch)
2026 large projects at delay risk	30–50% (Sightline estimate)
MISO projected load growth to 2035	+42 GW (35%)