Texas Needs Equivalent of 30 Reactors to Meet Data Center Demand

Demand on the Texas power grid is expected to expand so immensely that it would take the equivalent of adding 30 nuclear plants’ worth of electricity by 2030 to meet the needs.

That’s according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid. The forecast is based on the addition of new data centers needed to power artificial intelligence. And it’s raising concerns about whether infrastructure in the state will be able to expand fast enough — and at what cost.

Servers and hard drives inside a data center in Dallas.

Photographer: Ben Torres/Bloomberg

Coming out of the pandemic, electricity demand on the Texas grid was already growing faster ...