Big Tech is racing to build artificial intelligence data centers, and the electricity to run them may not arrive in time. Private spending on data center construction jumped about 64.5 percent after inflation between August 2025 and August 2026, reaching an annual rate of roughly $85 billion. Spending on power construction over that same stretch grew just 4.1 percent. That gap is the whole story: the buildings are going up faster than the plants and power lines meant to feed them.

Industry leaders, grid operators, and economists describe a system under strain rather than a crisis today. The Daily Caller News Foundation talked to the head of the nation’s rural electric cooperatives, the operator of most of the Texas grid, and energy analysts. Here is what they found.

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From the Daily Caller:

America’s power grid may not be able to keep pace with Big Tech’s race to build artificial intelligence data centers.

“If you want to go buy a gas turbine today, you can’t get one for 2032 because they’ve all been reserved,” National Rural Electric Cooperative Association CEO Jim Matheson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So everyone’s betting on natural gas, and everyone’s looking to build right now.”

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which runs most of the Lone Star State’s grid, was tracking about 474 gigawatts of requests from large power users as of June 2026, roughly 90 percent of them data centers, an ERCOT spokesperson told the DCNF. That is up from 63 gigawatts in Dec. 2024, ERCOT data from 2025 shows.

Texas is the clearest test case. The 474 gigawatts of large-load requests now in ERCOT’s queue amount to more than five times the state’s all-time peak demand, according to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. Abbott ordered an audit of data center connections on Aug. 3, saying projects that fail to meet state requirements “must be denied connection to the Texas grid.” ERCOT then paused connecting new large data centers until that audit and a community impact review are complete, per a Sept. 15 board presentation.

The cost question is where the fight turns. PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, serves about 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. Data centers accounted for about $6.5 billion, or 40 percent, of the $16.4 billion price tag from PJM’s December 2025 power auction, according to a January report from Monitoring Analytics, the grid’s independent market monitor. The Data Center Coalition disputes that its industry is driving up household bills. Research it released from consulting firm E3 in May found no historical evidence data centers raised residential electricity costs, noting rates climbed less in high-demand Texas and Virginia than in most states, while California and New York saw some of the steepest increases despite falling demand.

Utilities say they are spending to catch up. Investor-owned utilities went from about $104 billion on grid and plants in 2015 to about $178 billion in 2024, per Edison Electric Institute data, with the trade group projecting more than $220 billion in 2026. EEI President and CEO Drew Maloney told the DCNF, “We need more steel in the ground and electrons on the grid.” Matheson, a moderate-to-conservative Democrat who represented Utah in the U.S. House for seven terms and served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, flagged a risk most people miss: if a whole power plant is built to serve a 1,000-megawatt data center and the data center walks away, ratepayers can be left holding the bill, and plants are built to run up to 80 years. He said there is no industry standard for handling that risk. Christopher Johnson of the American Energy Leadership Institute said permitting needs a clear, durable path, warning that “blocking new power while demand grows is how you turn an economic opportunity into an affordability problem.” Economist Jason Furman cautioned against overreading the gap, saying twice as many data centers would not require twice as many power plants.

Let’s pray for honest and capable stewardship of our energy, for leaders who will not shrink from hard decisions, and for abundant, affordable power that serves families and not only the largest players.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

(Excerpt from the Daily Caller. Photo Credit: metamorworks from Getty Images Pro).