AI power: Top 10 tech titans unleash gas, nuke & solar power plants to fuel the bot boom

Every like or heart ❤️ you tap on your smartphone, every binge-watched video 🎥,, every meme, text, image, or animation you share — powers up from a data centre humming somewhere.

These giant high-security warehouses crossed with sci-fi server farms are the present-day equivalent of mainframe computer rooms from the 1940s-1970s.

Power hogs

To say they are energy-intensive is an understatement: the AI boom is bigger than the internet itself.

The vast, humming halls of precision-engineered chaos that power AI systems under strict climate control guzzle electricity due to stacks energy-intensive AI and "crypto-mining" servers.

And it's just the beginning.

S&P Global estimates a massive 11.3-Gigawatt (GW) data centre demand rise in 2025 alone; a report by Coeli, which runs energy funds, calls this bring-your-own power rewiring an "all-of-the-above" necessity.​

Demand explosion

In general, servers guzzles up to 60%, while cooling them and the data warehouse takes 7-30%. AI models like GPT-3 training alone used 1,287 MWh; inference scales massively.

Amid AI's explosion, a key challenge emerges: where to get the power to cover 100%+ annual compute growth?

The AI power crunch hit like a plot twist no one saw coming — a sort of tech "black swan" moment — but one that serves up mega opportunities.

According to International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates, the 945 TWh additional electricity demand from data centres by 2030 is a realistic figure.

At the higher end of the IEA estimate, power infrastructure demand could go up to 1,000+ TWh by 2030.​

How on earth can it be ramped in such a short span of time?

For scale, the US generated around 4,178 TWh (Terawatt-hours) of electricity in 2023, a capacity that took 141+ years to build (since 1882), as per the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Data centre energy demand

US projections

• 2024: 183 TWh (4-4.4% national electricity)​

• 2026: ~300-400 TWh (rising demand)​

• 2028: 6.7-12% of US total; 426 TWh by 2030 (+133%)​

• Capacity: 75.8 GW (2026), 108 GW (2028)​

Global projections

• 2022: 460 TWh (1% global)​

• 2026: ~1,050 TWh​

• 2030: 945 TWh

• AI share: 5-15% now, 35-50% by 2030.​

Due to potential grid meltdowns from the spike in data centre demand, tech giants are racing to generate their own power.

As AI training and inference devour massive energy — data centres could consume 8-10% of US power by 2030 — while grids face delays in connections (3-5 years).

Self-generation via gas turbines, nuclear restarts, and renewables ensures 24/7 uptime without utility bottlenecks.

Top 10 tech companies

AI scales, this hybrid on-site/grid trend will continue. Following are the top 10 companies, ranked by announced investments/projects (2024-2026 data).