From Microgrids to Hypergrids: Data Center Power Demands + Hyperscaler Capital is Creating a New Grid Architecture

About 0.3 percent of US power was generated by microgrids in 2024, but data centers use about 4.4 percent of US power today, a figure expected to grow to about 12 percent by 2030. The urgent rush to develop new and more capable “frontier models,” which are critical to the functioning of AI applications, is viewed as an existential requirement for hyperscalers and is inherently linked to enormous energy consumption. These models are developed using power-hungry machine learning algori