Exercising political power is all the rage these days throughout the world, while concerns about electrical power continue to consume the tech industry's conversations. The latter type of power indeed underpins all conversations about new data centers, AI development, AI centers and hubs, and the multi-gigawatt dreams that accompany today's particularly dynamic point in tech history.

The word “looming” is often deployed in industry and general media reports, as concerns about the power requirements of a doubling or tripling of the world's data center footprint are expressed by industry and government sources alike. This week has simultaneously seen a statement by the US administration calling for a doubling of the entire US electrical grid and a serious new study that in essence says data centers can just scale back a little bit to handle any concerns.

The fact is the total US electricity grid has twice the installed capacity as the nation's average demand – average consumption is on the order of 500GW and installed capacity on the order of 1,250GW. This amount of hypothetical headroom is not equally distributed, though. Concerns about meeting demand are already at close to a crisis mode in Northern Virginia, have been expressed elsewhere in the US, and are a big issue in Singapore, the Netherlands, Ireland, and South Korea.

Concerns are even more profound throughout the developing world, much of which already has difficulty supplying basic needs. There are more than 2 billion people in the world who are used to routine blackouts, which can extend hours and days. Even modest data center projects of a few megawatts will strain local grids. One answer has been to develop specific electricity resources – whether from wind, solar, or fossil fuels – to serve new data centers in the developing world. But this can be a tough sell in nations with populations that don't have adequate electricity and won't benefit directly from new resources that only feed data centers.

IDCA's research shows that more than two dozen nations operate electrical grids that provide 2 to 5 percent of the per-person power found throughout the EU. There simply must be a priority to bring the developing world up to at least 25 percent average, and ideally 40 percent, so that all the world can benefit from what appears to be a rapidly expanding data center footprint, and increasingly, an AI center footprint.