THE GRID
The Crossover
One table in Gartner's new report stopped me cold.
In 2025, old-style servers used 193 terawatt-hours of power. AI servers used 95. Less than half.
Fast forward to 2027. AI servers will use 258 terawatt-hours. Old servers? Just 200.
That's the crossover. AI machines will eat more power than every other server on Earth. Combined.
Gartner put these numbers out on June 10. The top-line figure: global data center power use will hit 565 TWh this year. That's up 26% from 447 TWh in 2025.
For scale — France used 446 TWh of power in all of 2025. Data centers alone will blow past that this year.
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AI servers now drive 31% of all data center power. Two years ago, that share was a rounding error. By next year, it will be the biggest slice on the chart.
And the machines need to stay cool. Cooling power jumps 23% this year. Then 25% next year. As chips run hotter, the bill to cool them grows just as fast.
"Surging demand for compute-intensive AI workloads is driving unprecedented data center power growth, while AI capacity is now constrained by power availability, making data center power security the new battle ground for scaling and protecting margins in the global AI race."
I've spent weeks writing about the supply side. How utilities plan to spend. Who's merging with whom. The firms that build gas plants just to skip the permit line.
All of that is real. But the demand side keeps pulling ahead.
By 2030, Gartner says data center power will top 1,200 TWh. More than double today. Raw demand will hit 290 gigawatts — more than double the current 132 GW.
The grid can't match that pace. The wires, plants, and permits to serve that load don't exist yet. Most aren't even filed.
A lot of people track the AI trade through chips. Nvidia. AMD. Cloud spend.
I track it through the power cord.
A data center with no power is a very costly warehouse. Right now, power is the hard part.
Not the chips. Not the code. The watts.
In energy today, one question runs the whole game: who can get electrons to a data center fastest?
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VOLTAGE
The Battery Wave
Texas nearly doubled its battery grid in twelve months.
At the start of 2025, ERCOT had 7.8 GW of batteries on the system. By year-end: 13.9 GW. Sixty new sites came online in a single year.
Now zoom out. The EIA says 24.3 GW of new battery storage will go live across the U.S. this year. That smashes the 15 GW record from 2025.
The country now holds over 40 GW of installed storage.
Batteries aren't replacing gas plants. Not yet. But they do something just as useful: they soak up cheap solar by day and push it out at the evening peak.
In Texas, batteries now handle about 19% of peak demand. Two years ago, that figure was near zero.
Speed is the key edge. The IEA puts median build time for a big battery at about 275 days. A gas plant takes over two years.
A new transmission line? Seven years or more.
When the grid is short on power, the fastest new supply wins. Right now, that's storage.
Data centers run around the clock. Batteries can't serve that full load alone. But paired with solar, they cover the daytime hours cheaply.
And they ease the strain on a grid being asked to do far more than it was built for.
The EIA says 86 GW of total new U.S. capacity will come online this year. Solar and storage make up close to 80%.
Batteries aren't just a clean-energy bet. They're a grid-speed bet. And in a market starved for watts, speed is worth more than ever.
WIRED IN
Four Signals From the Build-Out
Quanta Services (PWR) posted Q1 revenue of $7.87 billion — up 26% from a year ago. Adjusted EPS of $2.68 beat the Street by 31%. The backlog hit a record. When the grid builds out, the firms that pull the wires eat first.
From wires to switches: Eaton (ETN) hit a record quarter too. Sales of $7.5 billion, up 17%. The real tell? Orders in its Electrical Americas unit surged 42% organically. Backlog up 44%. They also closed the Boyd Thermal deal, adding liquid cooling for data centers. Grid to chip — Eaton sits in the middle of all of it.
Smaller but faster: Solaris Energy Infrastructure (SEI) grew Q1 revenue 55% to $196 million. The engine? Contracts to power AI data centers directly. Morgan Stanley just raised its price target to $90. A year ago, most investors hadn't heard this name.
The money is voting. The GRID ETF — First Trust's smart grid fund — now holds roughly $11 billion in assets. It pulled in over $700 million in the past month alone. Grid infrastructure is no longer a niche trade. It's becoming one of the biggest themes in the market.
