Could data center growth halt by 2030? Report claims power demands may halt AI advances within the next few years

A data center with racks of servers and lots of lights glowing.

• Gartner study suggests AI data center power requirements will grow by 26% in 2026
• This is a 13% increase over an earlier forecast which capped growth at 500TWh.
• AI data centers currently account for 31% of total data center power consumption, but are projected to exceed conventional server power needs by 2027

The last few years have seen AI chip demand skyrocket, with every major player in the industry investing in infrastructure, training, and inference hardware to build out their own data centers and clouds for compute.