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Onsite Generation Expected to Fully Power 27% of Data Center Facilities by 2030

Data centers are adopting onsite power as a primary energy source, according to the 2025 Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy.

Data centers are likely to continue to struggle with the timely availability of electricity, according to the report, which carries major implications for the future of the AI industry.

The report's mid-year update shows that securing electricity for data centers is likely to take much longer than anticipated, and that power availability is now the leading factor in site selection. The report offers a timely lens into what matters most to the leaders shaping the future of the AI industry in America, including:

Data center developers are underestimating time to power

Utility providers report significantly longer timelines to deliver power in key US markets, up to 2 years longer than what hyperscalers and colocation providers expect.

Power access is a leading factor in data center site selection

84% of respondents ranked availability of power among their top three considerations.

Onsite power is increasingly critical

In 2030, 38% of facilities are expected to use some onsite generation for primary power, up from 13% a year ago. Notably, 27% of facilities expect to be fully powered by onsite generation by 2030, a 27x increase from just 1% last year.

AI is driving larger, more power-intensive data centers

The median data center size is expected to grow by nearly 115%, from approximately 175 MW today to about 375 MW over the next 10 years.

Reducing carbon emissions is a lower but lasting priority

95% of those surveyed affirmed that sustainability and carbon reduction targets are still in place, even if the path to achieving those goals may not be linear.

"Decisions around where data centers get built have shifted dramatically over the last six months, with access to power now playing the most significant role in location scouting," said Aman Joshi, Bloom Energy's Chief Commercial Officer. "The grid can't keep pace with AI demands, so the industry is taking control with onsite power generation. When you control your power, you control your timeline, and immediate access to energy is what separates viable projects from stalled ones."

According to the survey, operators are looking beyond legacy power generation to solutions that offer fast deployment timelines, low emissions, and the ability to handle intense and fluctuating AI workloads, all while meeting the industry's uncompromising reliability standards and cost requirements.

Methodology: The latest report is based on data collected from April 2024 to April 2025, which surveyed approximately 100 decision-makers across the entire data center power ecosystem, reflecting perspectives from hyperscalers, colocation developers, utilities, and GPU service providers. 

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Onsite Generation Expected to Fully Power 27% of Data Center Facilities by 2030

Data centers are adopting onsite power as a primary energy source, according to the 2025 Data Center Power Report from Bloom Energy.

Data centers are likely to continue to struggle with the timely availability of electricity, according to the report, which carries major implications for the future of the AI industry.

The report's mid-year update shows that securing electricity for data centers is likely to take much longer than anticipated, and that power availability is now the leading factor in site selection. The report offers a timely lens into what matters most to the leaders shaping the future of the AI industry in America, including:

Data center developers are underestimating time to power

Utility providers report significantly longer timelines to deliver power in key US markets, up to 2 years longer than what hyperscalers and colocation providers expect.

Power access is a leading factor in data center site selection

84% of respondents ranked availability of power among their top three considerations.

Onsite power is increasingly critical

In 2030, 38% of facilities are expected to use some onsite generation for primary power, up from 13% a year ago. Notably, 27% of facilities expect to be fully powered by onsite generation by 2030, a 27x increase from just 1% last year.

AI is driving larger, more power-intensive data centers

The median data center size is expected to grow by nearly 115%, from approximately 175 MW today to about 375 MW over the next 10 years.

Reducing carbon emissions is a lower but lasting priority

95% of those surveyed affirmed that sustainability and carbon reduction targets are still in place, even if the path to achieving those goals may not be linear.

"Decisions around where data centers get built have shifted dramatically over the last six months, with access to power now playing the most significant role in location scouting," said Aman Joshi, Bloom Energy's Chief Commercial Officer. "The grid can't keep pace with AI demands, so the industry is taking control with onsite power generation. When you control your power, you control your timeline, and immediate access to energy is what separates viable projects from stalled ones."

According to the survey, operators are looking beyond legacy power generation to solutions that offer fast deployment timelines, low emissions, and the ability to handle intense and fluctuating AI workloads, all while meeting the industry's uncompromising reliability standards and cost requirements.

Methodology: The latest report is based on data collected from April 2024 to April 2025, which surveyed approximately 100 decision-makers across the entire data center power ecosystem, reflecting perspectives from hyperscalers, colocation developers, utilities, and GPU service providers. 

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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 ...