The gigawatt ledger: tracking AI data center campuses and power deals

The campus ledger

The AI build-out has moved from individual data halls to campuses measured in gigawatts. This tracker uses Epoch AI’s satellite-based data center directory as a common yardstick, because company announcements mix facility power, grid interconnection and long-range ambitions. Epoch reports IT power (the load available to servers), which is typically below a site’s headline facility or grid figure. We show both where a company has published a headline number.

Summing Epoch’s figures, the eleven campuses reach 14,358 MW of planned IT power, of which 4,121 MW was operating in early October 2026. Three campuses (Fairwater Atlanta, Pryor North and, nearly, Colossus 2) are mostly built; the rest of the pipeline lands in 2027 and 2028. Several announced projects sit outside Epoch’s detailed coverage: Stargate Milam County, Texas (SB Energy, 1.2 GW per Epoch’s April 2026 review; OpenAI had cited 1.5 GW), Stargate Port Washington, Wisconsin (Vantage, 1.3 GW), the Lordstown, Ohio SoftBank site (under 0.3 GW of visible data center build) and CoreWeave’s $6 billion Lancaster, Pennsylvania campus (100 MW initial, up to 300 MW).

Announced versus measured

The gap between headline and measured capacity is material. Meta has described Hyperion as scaling to 5 GW and raised its infrastructure budget to more than $50 billion in July 2026 (from $10 billion in 2024 and $27 billion in 2025), but Epoch’s current build plan shows 1,632 MW of IT power by early 2028. Amazon’s 2.2 GW figure for New Carlisle is a total power draw; Epoch’s planned IT power is 1,925 MW. Stargate shows the same pattern: OpenAI said in September 2025 that its sites brought planned capacity to nearly 7 GW and over $400 billion of investment over three years, while the four Oracle-hosted campuses Epoch tracks in detail total 4,981 MW of IT power, with $188.6 billion of estimated capex, and only Abilene’s 421 MW is running.

Plans also contract. In March 2026 Oracle and OpenAI dropped a 600 MW expansion at Abilene that would have taken the site toward 2 GW, citing power arriving roughly a year later than the hardware cycle; the core 1.2 GW campus remained on schedule and the broader 4.5 GW Oracle agreement was unaffected. Readers should treat headline gigawatts as options and Epoch’s dated build plans as the better guide to near-term supply.

The power deal book

Hyperscalers are contracting for firm power on two tracks: existing or restarted nuclear plants that can deliver this decade, and advanced reactors and on-site gas that come later or carry execution risk.

The four existing or restart nuclear contracts total 4,491 MW. The advanced nuclear options (TerraPower, Oklo, Vistra uprates, Kairos, X-energy) add roughly 9.9 GW in announced maximums, nearly all after 2030. That timing gap explains why the near-term campus pipeline leans on gas: Colossus 2 runs on gas turbines in Mississippi with on-site batteries, Prometheus on dedicated gas plants, Abilene on turbines plus a 1 GW substation, and Hyperion on new Entergy generation.

Grid queues and ERCOT large loads

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory counted 2,061 GW of generation and storage in US interconnection queues at the end of 2025, down 10% from the prior year and from a peak of nearly 2,600 GW at end 2023. Gas was the exception, with 253 GW queued, up 86% year on year. Only 13% of capacity requested from 2000 to 2020 had reached operation by end 2025, and the median project took more than three years to sign an interconnection agreement.

The load side is now the bottleneck in Texas. ERCOT faced an estimated 474 GW of large-load interconnection requests as of August 2026, about 90% of them data centers. Governor Greg Abbott ordered an audit of data centers in the queue covering on-site generation, water and public incentives, and ERCOT delayed its Batch Zero study, which follows a new large-load process approved in June 2026. New York imposed a one-year data center approval moratorium in July 2026. In PJM, Constellation has asked FERC to transfer capacity interconnection rights from its Eddystone plant to Crane after PJM analysis suggested the restart might not connect until 2031.

Demand projections

The LBNL range implies US data center consumption growing 85% to 230% between 2023 and 2028, and the IEA path implies global data center demand rising about 2.3 times from 2024 to 2030 (our calculations). EIA does not break out data centers in the figures cited but attributes the record demand path largely to AI and crypto data centers.

Risks to the ledger

• Interconnection timing. Queue durations above three years and cases like Crane’s possible 2031 connection can strand campuses that are otherwise built.
• Equipment scarcity. GE Vernova’s 116 GW of gas turbine backlog and reservations against about 20 GW of annualized output (rising to 24 GW in 2028 and 30 GW in 2030) limits how fast on-site gas can scale.
• Policy pushback. The Texas audit and New York moratorium show state willingness to slow large loads over reliability, water and subsidy concerns.
• Hardware cycle mismatch. The Abilene expansion was dropped partly because power would arrive after a GPU generation turned over.
• Financing concentration. Oracle reportedly carries more than $100 billion of debt tied to Stargate commitments, and Hyperion is 80% held by Blue Owl, placing off-balance-sheet and credit risk on a small set of counterparties.
• Advanced nuclear execution. Most of the roughly 9.9 GW of advanced nuclear options depend on first-of-a-kind reactors arriving between 2030 and 2039.

Methodology

Campus figures come from Epoch AI’s AI data center directory entries, last updated October 2 to 5, 2026. Epoch estimates IT power and capital cost from satellite imagery, permits and disclosures; capex includes compute hardware and is Epoch’s estimate, not a company figure. Announced capacity and investment come from company releases and press reports, with dates in Sources. We selected the largest US campuses with Epoch detail pages, plus announced sites without them listed in text only. Totals, the operating share (4,121 of 14,358 MW), capex per planned gigawatt ($543.7B divided by 14.358 GW), the Stargate subtotal, nuclear subtotals and growth multiples were computed in Python from the cited inputs. Chart bar lengths are percentages of the largest value (2,263 MW). Advanced nuclear totals sum announced maximums and are not delivery forecasts. Limitations: IT power and facility power are not directly comparable; Epoch projections can change as plans shift; the ERCOT figure covers requests, not committed load; and some deal terms (prices, Vistra existing-plant PPA volumes) were not verified.

Sources

• Epoch AI, AI data centers directory (campus entries) (as of October 5, 2026)
• Epoch AI, OpenAI Stargate: where the US sites stand (as of April 17, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE, Meta boosts Hyperion investment to $50B (as of July 13, 2026)
• Tom’s Hardware, Oracle and OpenAI scrap 600 MW Abilene expansion (as of March 10, 2026)
• Utility Dive, Talen and Amazon 1,920 MW nuclear PPA (as of June 2025)
• ANS Nuclear Newswire, Meta deals with Vistra, Oklo, TerraPower (as of January 12, 2026)
• ANS Nuclear Newswire, Constellation seeks FERC help with Crane restart (as of April 3, 2026)
• Utility Dive, Texas pauses data center interconnections amid 474 GW of requests (as of August 5, 2026)
• APPA, LBNL Queued Up interconnection queue data (as of July 1, 2026)
• Turbomachinery Magazine, GE Vernova Q2 2026 turbine backlog (as of July 23, 2026)