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Data Centers Plan to Reduce Reliance on Grid

More data center leaders are reducing their reliance on utility grids by investing in onsite power for rapidly scaling data centers, according to the Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy.

The report also revealed that power availability is driving data center development decisions as the industry moves into a new set of power-friendly regions. Together, these findings suggest a significant structural market shift for "AI factories" and other high-density data centers.

The report's findings indicate that:

Power availability is creating new geographic winners and losers

Texas is poised to capture nearly 30% of U.S. data center market share by 2028 and Georgia's market share is expected to grow by 75% (from 4% of the total data center market to 7%) as developers expand deeper into the Southeast. In contrast, California, Oregon, Iowa, and Nebraska's respective relative market shares are expected to drop by more than 50%.

More data centers are approaching gigawatt scale

Over 50% of new data center campuses are predicted to exceed 500 MW by 2035 and nearly one-third of new data center campuses to exceed 1 GW, with each 1 GW campus consuming roughly as much electricity as the entirety of San Francisco.

The power expectation gap is widening in key hubs

Utilities project delivery timelines are approximately 1.5-2 years longer than hyperscalers and colocation providers expect. Over the past six months, the expectation gap has widened in three critical hubs – Northern Virginia, the Bay Area, and Atlanta.

Data center developers plan to make big bets in off-grid power

Hyperscalers and colocation providers expect that roughly one-third of data centers in 2030 will use 100% onsite power, a 22% increase from the previous report six months ago. Developers surveyed believe that, by 2030, onsite power will be a leading solution to minimizing development timelines and costs.

Higher-voltage and DC electrical architectures are moving from roadmap to reality

As AI campuses scale to gigawatts, operators are redesigning power systems to handle denser loads and faster build schedules. 45% of respondents expect to adopt direct-current (DC) distribution architectures in their new data centers by 2028. These designs are likely to be incorporated into data centers entering development this year.

"Data center and AI factory developers can't afford delays. Our analysis and survey results show that they're moving into power-advantaged regions where capacity can be secured faster—and increasingly designing campuses to operate independently of the grid," said Natalie Sunderland, Bloom Energy's Chief Marketing Officer. "The surge in AI demand creates a clear opportunity for states that can adapt to support large-scale AI deployments at speed."

Methodology: The 2026 Bloom Energy Data Center Power report is based on surveys commissioned via a double-blind process between Bloom Energy and respondents. Surveys were conducted in November 2025 with 152 decision-makers across the data center power ecosystem, reflecting perspectives from hyperscalers, colocation developers, utilities, and GPU service providers. Interviews were also conducted with industry leaders to pressure test findings and assess real-world implications.

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Data Centers Plan to Reduce Reliance on Grid

More data center leaders are reducing their reliance on utility grids by investing in onsite power for rapidly scaling data centers, according to the Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy.

The report also revealed that power availability is driving data center development decisions as the industry moves into a new set of power-friendly regions. Together, these findings suggest a significant structural market shift for "AI factories" and other high-density data centers.

The report's findings indicate that:

Power availability is creating new geographic winners and losers

Texas is poised to capture nearly 30% of U.S. data center market share by 2028 and Georgia's market share is expected to grow by 75% (from 4% of the total data center market to 7%) as developers expand deeper into the Southeast. In contrast, California, Oregon, Iowa, and Nebraska's respective relative market shares are expected to drop by more than 50%.

More data centers are approaching gigawatt scale

Over 50% of new data center campuses are predicted to exceed 500 MW by 2035 and nearly one-third of new data center campuses to exceed 1 GW, with each 1 GW campus consuming roughly as much electricity as the entirety of San Francisco.

The power expectation gap is widening in key hubs

Utilities project delivery timelines are approximately 1.5-2 years longer than hyperscalers and colocation providers expect. Over the past six months, the expectation gap has widened in three critical hubs – Northern Virginia, the Bay Area, and Atlanta.

Data center developers plan to make big bets in off-grid power

Hyperscalers and colocation providers expect that roughly one-third of data centers in 2030 will use 100% onsite power, a 22% increase from the previous report six months ago. Developers surveyed believe that, by 2030, onsite power will be a leading solution to minimizing development timelines and costs.

Higher-voltage and DC electrical architectures are moving from roadmap to reality

As AI campuses scale to gigawatts, operators are redesigning power systems to handle denser loads and faster build schedules. 45% of respondents expect to adopt direct-current (DC) distribution architectures in their new data centers by 2028. These designs are likely to be incorporated into data centers entering development this year.

"Data center and AI factory developers can't afford delays. Our analysis and survey results show that they're moving into power-advantaged regions where capacity can be secured faster—and increasingly designing campuses to operate independently of the grid," said Natalie Sunderland, Bloom Energy's Chief Marketing Officer. "The surge in AI demand creates a clear opportunity for states that can adapt to support large-scale AI deployments at speed."

Methodology: The 2026 Bloom Energy Data Center Power report is based on surveys commissioned via a double-blind process between Bloom Energy and respondents. Surveys were conducted in November 2025 with 152 decision-makers across the data center power ecosystem, reflecting perspectives from hyperscalers, colocation developers, utilities, and GPU service providers. Interviews were also conducted with industry leaders to pressure test findings and assess real-world implications.

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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