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In Britain, more than 100 gigawatts of data centre demand sits in a connection pipeline that stretches to 2035. In Pennsylvania, the price of standby power has hit its legal ceiling two years running. Nvidia's chief executive named the condition 18 months ago. Power, not silicon, now sets the pace.
Jensen Huang said it plainly at his GTC keynote in San Jose on 18 March 2025. "Every single data center in the future will be power limited. Your revenues are power limited." He went on: "We are now a power limited industry. Our revenues will associate with that." The full keynote is public. GTC is Nvidia's annual GPU Technology Conference.
The claim is easy to make. The evidence is in the queue and the price.
The opening was not a forecast. It was a chief executive naming the ceiling
The remark landed as a headline. It should be read as a diagnosis. The company that sells the chips said the chips are no longer the limit. Demand for compute is outrunning the supply of electricity to feed it. That is a statement about grids, not about graphics processors. It shifts the binding constraint from the fab to the substation. Our analysis takes Huang at his word and asks what the data shows. Two datasets answer directly: the interconnection queue and the capacity price.
The queue is the proof. 2,061 GW waits, and the median wait is five years
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) tracks every project seeking to connect to the US grid. Its latest edition, covering data to the end of 2025, counts about 8,200 active projects. Together they represent 1,312 GW of generation and about 749 GW of storage. A gigawatt (GW) is one thousand megawatts. The median project built in 2025 spent over five years in the queue. Only 13% of capacity requested between 2000 and 2020 ever reached operation. Three quarters was withdrawn. Gas requests rose 86% in a year, to 253 GW.
The price is the proof. PJM clears at its £250 cap for the second year
PJM runs the grid for 67 million people across 13 US states and Washington DC. Its capacity auction pays generators to be available at peak. For the 2027/28 delivery year, the price cleared at the regulatory cap of £250 ($333, €293) per megawatt-day. That is the second consecutive auction pinned at the ceiling. The auction for the 2024/25 delivery year cleared at £22 ($29, €26). The cleared supply is worth about £12bn ($16bn, €14bn). A capped price is a market saying it cannot buy more.
Your AI campus has chips on order and no grid date. What do you do first?
Data centres drive 5,100 MW of a 5,250 MW load increase
The demand signature is unambiguous. PJM's forecast peak for 2027/28 rose about 5,250 MW on the prior year. Nearly 5,100 MW of that increase came from data centres. That is 97% of the growth from one customer class. The auction fell 6,623 MW short of its reliability requirement. It was the first time the entire region missed the standard. PJM's own executive said data centre demand "continues to far outstrip new supply." The mix that did clear was 43% gas, 21% nuclear and 20% coal.
The IEA puts the global number at 945 TWh by 2030
The pressure is not confined to one grid. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024, or 1.5% of global electricity. Its base case reaches about 945 TWh by 2030, just under 3% of the world total. That is growth of roughly 15% a year. It runs more than four times faster than every other sector combined. Electricity for AI-focused servers grows fastest, at about 30% a year. The queue is the local symptom of a global curve.
Britain shows the same queue in a smaller grid. 100 GW waits 5 to 10 years
The pattern repeats at a different scale. Britain's National Energy System Operator (NESO) rebuilt its connection queue in 2025. It cut a generation pipeline of over 700 GW to 238 GW retained. More than 100 GW of large demand, mostly data centres, was sorted into blocks reaching to 2035. Only about 13 GW of firm demand can connect before 2030. Typical data centre lead times run five to ten years. The state has pledged 500 MW per AI Growth Zone to jump the line. A £40bn ($53bn, €47bn) clean-power plan underwrites the fix.
China builds 40 GW of data centres and moves them west to find the power
China moves fastest on approvals. Rystad Energy expects its data centre capacity to reach about 40 GW by the end of 2026. That is up from 32 GW a year earlier. Another 28 GW is due by 2030, taking the total past 60 GW. Consumption would more than double, to about 289 TWh. Yet even here, power sets the map. The "East Data West Computing" strategy pushed eight hubs west to ease land and energy pressure. Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia alone holds about 10 GW of projects. We note this as an engineering observation, not a model to copy.
The Gulf skips the queue by building generation with the compute
One region has answered the queue by refusing to join it. Abu Dhabi's Stargate campus draws nuclear, solar and gas built alongside the data halls. Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN follows the same play on gas and solar. Co-locating generation with compute removes the interconnection wait entirely. That was our analysis last week, and the queue data confirms why it matters. Where power arrives with the site, the five-year median disappears. Sovereign capital makes it possible. The physics is the same everywhere.
The investment implication: price the queue, not the chip
The capital lesson follows from the evidence. The binding constraint is now priced, and the price sits at a cap. Underwriting that values the campus by its chips misreads the asset. The interconnection date and the capacity cost decide the return. Relief is coming, but slowly. PJM has processed over 170,000 MW of requests since 2023. Yet 57 GW with signed agreements stalls on permits, local opposition and supply chains. LBNL notes that FERC Order 2023 reforms are too new to measure. Water adds a second limit. Europe's 2026 drought derated river-cooled reactors on the Danube, Meuse and Moselle in August, with dry conditions forecast into September.
The bottom line
Huang named the ceiling. The queue and the price measure it. Some 2,061 GW waits a median of five years, and PJM pays its legal maximum for standby power. Data centres account for 97% of the growth that pushed it there. From Pennsylvania to Britain to China, the wire sets the date. Intelligence can map which sites clear first. The megawatt still has to arrive.
Next week: Only one small reactor has a public price. The rest of the SMR market hides it.
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