Data‑centre builds face real execution limits

The surprise in artificial intelligence infrastructure right now is not demand. It is that a data centre can have tenants, land and financing slides, and still fail because it cannot get enough electricity at the right voltage on the right date. (iea.org) North America is not short of interest in server space. Jones Lang LaSalle said vacancy stayed at 1% for a second straight year in 2025 even as construction hit record levels, which means customers are still taking almost everything that gets delivered. (jll.com) The bottleneck starts with power. The Electric Power Research Institute now projects United States data centres could use 9% to 17% of national electricity by 2030, up from a much smaller share today, and that forecast is wide because the grid and supply chain may not keep up. (powering-intelligence.epri.com) Electricity for a data centre is not like plugging in a warehouse. A large artificial intelligence campus needs substations, transmission upgrades and utility approvals, and Jones Lang LaSalle says power availability can take up to a decade in some markets. (jll.com) Even when a utility is willing to serve a project, the hardware can be missing. Bloomberg reported on April 1 that almost half of the United States data centres planned for 2026 are expected to be delayed or cancelled because transformers, switchgear and batteries are hard to get. (bloomberg.com) Permitting has become its own brake. Loudoun County, Virginia, the biggest data-centre cluster in the world, voted 7-2 on March 18, 2025 to end by-right data-centre development in affected zones, which means more projects now need special approvals instead of a simpler administrative path. (loudoun.gov) Cooling is another limit that looks small on a spreadsheet and large on the ground. The National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates said in a 2025 briefing that data centres use water for thermal management and about 80% of that water can be evaporated as steam in some cooling systems. (nasuca.org) That is why the market is splitting in two. Projects with secured grid access, ordered equipment and signed utility agreements are moving ahead, while projects that only have a land option and a pitch deck are running into what Enerdatics called a “power deliverability” problem in its February 2026 market report. (enerdatics.com) The geography is shifting with that split. The Electric Power Research Institute says Virginia already has data centres using more than 20% of the state’s electricity, and by 2030 states including Oregon, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona and Indiana could also cross that 20% threshold under its medium scenario. (powering-intelligence.epri.com) That helps explain why developers are chasing places with land near transmission, gas generation or easier local approvals instead of just chasing the biggest internet hubs. Jones Lang LaSalle said 64% of the 35 gigawatt North American construction pipeline had already shifted beyond traditional mature markets by year-end 2025. (jll.com) So the real story is not that artificial intelligence demand disappeared. It is that the winners in 2026 look less like the people who announced the most gigawatts and more like the people who locked down power, permits, cooling and equipment two years earlier. (iea.org)