Half of the world’s mega datacentre projects may stall

TL;DR:

  • The Uptime Institute estimates about half of 250 datacentre projects above 100MW announced between 2021 and 2024 will be cancelled or delayed.
  • Grid strain, supply-chain limits, water use and local opposition are all working against the buildout that AI models depend on.
  • Even a slower rollout implies an unprecedented surge in power demand, roughly 80% of it from US projects.

AI models are improving faster than the buildings meant to run them. While OpenAI, Anthropic and Google ship rapid capability gains, the datacentres behind them are going up far more slowly, and many will not go up at all. The Uptime Institute, which rates datacentres, says roughly half of the 250 large projects announced over the past few years will either be scrapped or run late.

The physical limits of the boom

The reasons are stubborn and physical. Jay Dietrich, a research director at Uptime, points to developers without operational experience or committed tenants, projects clustered into strained “datacentre corridors”, and a supply chain that simply cannot deliver chips and equipment on the promised timeline. Power is the tightest constraint of all: in California, finished datacentres sit empty for years because the grid cannot feed them, and in Amsterdam a developer has sued the Dutch grid operator after being refused a connection. Cancelled mega-projects already include Arizona’s Project Range, Malaysia’s Cyberjaya campus and Virginia’s 2,000-acre Prince William Digital Gateway, the last halted partly over its proximity to a Civil War battlefield.

For UK readers, the pattern rhymes with problems closer to home. The Guardian’s own reporting has found the government’s ambition to make Britain an AI superpower rests on little scrutiny of the tradeoffs involved, with sites chosen without confirming they could actually be powered. That mirrors questions already raised over whether Britain can power its AI growth zones and the Scottish push to freeze new datacentres.

Looking forward

Not everyone is gloomy: property consultancy JLL still expects around 1,200 datacentres to be built globally by 2030, citing battery storage and on-site generation as ways around grid limits. But the arithmetic is sobering, with the seven largest planned sites proposing 45GW of combined on-site power, equal to the UK’s entire peak demand. As energy, water and community pushback collide, the constraint on AI over the next few years may prove to be concrete and copper, not code.

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