America’s AI boom is quickly becoming an electricity story.
U.S. data centers could require roughly $110 billion of investment to add 45 gigawatts of power capacity through 2030, according to estimates attributed to Moody’s. More than 30 GW could come from natural gas, potentially requiring another 4 billion cubic feet of daily gas supply.
The scale highlights a growing constraint for AI: building more data centers is becoming increasingly dependent on finding enough reliable electricity.
AI Data Centers Need Much More Power
For the past several years, the AI trade has revolved around GPUs, servers and semiconductor companies. Now, power availability is emerging as another bottleneck.
The International Energy Agency expects global data center electricity consumption to move toward 950 TWh by 2030, almost double 2025 levels, as AI and cloud workloads expand.
Coinpaper previously explored why electricity could become more important than GPUs as companies compete for grid connections and generation capacity.
Natural Gas Could Be a Major AI Winner
AI data centers need electricity around the clock, making reliable generation particularly valuable.
That is putting natural gas in an increasingly important position. More than 80% of announced behind-the-meter power projects serving U.S. data centers rely on gas, according to S&P Global.
McKinsey separately estimates U.S. and Canadian power generation could require around 4.1 billion cubic feet per day of additional natural gas by 2030, with data centers accounting for more than half of that increase.
The AI investment theme is therefore spreading well beyond Nvidia and other chipmakers. Our look at AI infrastructure stocks beyond semiconductors covers utilities, cooling, electrical equipment and other companies exposed to this buildout.
Could Data Centers Really Use 10% of U.S. Electricity?
The estimates are getting close.
Citi has projected that data centers could account for approximately 10.9% of total U.S. electricity consumption by 2030, compared with roughly 4.5% in 2023.
That would make AI infrastructure one of the biggest new sources of electricity demand in America.
| Metric | Estimate |
|---|---|
| New data center power capacity | 45 GW |
| Required investment | $110B |
| Potential natural gas capacity | 30+ GW |
| Additional gas demand | ~4 Bcf/d |
| Data center share of U.S. electricity | ~10% by 2030 |
Coinpaper has examined who is financing the AI data center boom. The next stage may increasingly be about who can actually power it.
