AI data center power: a site-by-site tracker of gigawatts, fuel and status

AI data center power is easiest to understand one site at a time, because the headline gigawatts mix three different things: what a company announced, what a utility has been approved to build, and what is actually drawing electricity. This tracker keeps those apart. Every row carries a date, a size, a power source and a status, and we only list a figure we found in a page we opened.

The short version as of October 6, 2026: a handful of campuses are energized at several hundred megawatts, most of the gigawatt-scale ones are 2027 to 2028 stories, and a large share of the new supply is gas, built on site or by a utility with the tech company footing the bill.

What is energized

Epoch AI, an independent research group, tracks these from satellite imagery, permits and company disclosures. Its estimates are of IT power, not total grid draw, and it says about 80% of its estimates land within a factor of 1.4 of the true value. Treat every number below as a range, not a meter reading.

• Oct 5, 2026, Anthropic and Amazon, New Carlisle, Indiana: about 910 MW of IT power now, projected 1,925 MW by Q1 2028. Status: operating and still ramping. Chips are Amazon Trainium2.
• Oct 2026, xAI Colossus 2, Memphis area: about 946 MW now, projected 1,531 MW in 2027. Status: operating, the largest in Epoch's list.
• Oct 2026, Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta: about 636 MW now. Status: operating.
• Oct 2026, Meta Prometheus: about 471 MW now. Status: operating.

Those four sit near or below one gigawatt each. That is the reality check on the word "gigawatt" in press releases: the biggest operating AI campuses are still under 1 GW of IT load.

Announced and under construction

• Apr 17, 2026, OpenAI Stargate Abilene, Texas: 0.3 GW operating of a projected 1.2 GW, target Q4 2026, on-site gas plus grid, per Epoch. Abilene was the only operating Stargate site on that date.
• Apr 17, 2026, other Stargate sites: Epoch lists Shackelford County, Texas (2.0 GW projected, on-site gas), Doña Ana County, New Mexico (2.2 GW, on-site gas), Milam County, Texas (1.2 GW), Port Washington, Wisconsin (1.3 GW, grid plus renewables) and Saline Township, Michigan (1.4 GW, utility grid), mostly targeting Q4 2028. Status: construction, zero energized. Epoch's October chart puts the New Mexico site at 1,750 MW, so the sizes move between updates.
• Sep 18, 2025, Microsoft Fairwater Wisconsin: Microsoft's own post describes three buildings on 315 acres, but gives no megawatt figure or power date. Epoch projects 2,263 MW by Q2 2028, its largest planned site.
• Aug 21, 2025, Meta Hyperion, Richland Parish, Louisiana: the state Public Service Commission voted 4 to 1 to approve 2.3 GW of Entergy gas generation: two combined-cycle plants in the parish due in 2028 and a third plant elsewhere due in 2029. Epoch projects 1,632 MW of IT power by 2028. Reports of a much larger expansion came out in March 2026, but we could not open a page confirming the numbers, so we do not list them.
• Mar 10, 2026, xAI Southaven, Mississippi: the state permit board approved 41 permanent gas turbines to replace 27 unpermitted units that had run since summer 2025 for Colossus 2. The permit board record we opened gives no megawatt figure.
• Nov 25, 2025, Amazon and NIPSCO, northern Indiana: up to 3 GW supplied by a utility affiliate, built as two 1.3 GW gas plants and a 400 MW, four-hour battery. Power delivery starts January 1, 2027 and ramps to 2.4 GW by the end of 2032. Amazon funds the build, and approval of the contract by the state commission and FERC was still pending in that report.

The grid-wide picture

Zoom out and the data shows a demand story, not yet a shortage. The US Energy Information Administration's September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook, released September 9, forecasts 4,135 billion kilowatt-hours of US electricity sales in 2026 and 4,211 billion in 2027, calling both records, and credits data center growth in the commercial sector. It also notes a temporary pause in connecting new data center projects to the Texas grid, which is the same bottleneck we cover in grid interconnection.

For the national numbers behind this, see our earlier piece on what the data-centre electricity figures show.

What the pattern says

Three things stand out across the rows.

First, on-site gas is the workaround. Several Stargate sites and xAI's Colossus 2 chose their own turbines because waiting for a grid connection takes longer than building a plant. That trades interconnection delay for air permits, and Mississippi shows what happens when the turbines come first and the paperwork second: the NAACP has threatened Clean Air Act action over the unpermitted units, according to the Mississippi Free Press.

Second, utilities are building for the labs under special contracts. NIPSCO's Amazon deal and Entergy's Hyperion plants both come with promises that other customers are protected. Opponents quoted in our sources dispute that. In Louisiana, at least $500 million in transmission costs would be shared by all ratepayers, according to the reporting we opened, and the one dissenting commissioner called the rate uncertainty "too bitter for me to swallow."

Third, dates slip and sizes change. The same Stargate site shows different megawatts in different months. Until a row says energized and cites a meter, a utility filing or a satellite estimate, read it as a plan.

What no source gives us

None of the companies gave an on-record number for how much of their load will be firm versus curtailable, and we found no official energized-megawatt figure for any site above. OpenAI's and Anthropic's own posts blocked or did not load for us, so every Stargate and Anthropic figure here is an Epoch estimate, not a company statement.

Our take

The gap between announced gigawatts and energized megawatts is the whole story. The largest operating AI campuses are under 1 GW today, and the multi-gigawatt sites arrive in 2028 if permits, turbines and transformers all land on time. Watch utility commission dockets, not press releases, because that is where costs and dates become binding.

How we update this page

We review it when a new utility filing, EIA release, regulator vote or Epoch data refresh lands, and we change a row's date and status in place. Last reviewed October 6, 2026.