Bloom Energy: Data Center Owners Plan to Reduce Reliance on Power Grid

(Data center illustration courtesy of Christina Morillo via Pexels)

As more data centers come online, developers are taking power into their own hands, a new report from Bloom Energy says.

The firm’s Data Center Power Report found that more data center leaders are reducing their reliance on utility grids by investing in onsite power for new data centers.

The report also found that power availability is driving data center location decisions as the industry moves into more power-friendly regions.

“Power availability is creating new geographic winners and losers: Texas is poised to capture nearly 30% of the U.S. data center market share by 2028 and Georgia’s market share is expected to grow by 75% (from 4% of the total data center market to 7%) as developers expand deeper into the Southeast,” the report said. “In contrast, California, Oregon, Iowa, and Nebraska’s respective relative market shares are expected to drop by more than 50%.”

Bloom Energy noted more data centers are approaching “gigawatt” scale: It forecasts that more than half of new data center campuses will exceed 500MW by 2035 and nearly one-third of new data center campuses will exceed 1GW. Each 1GW campus consumes roughly as much electricity as the city of San Francisco.

Data center developers are investing in off-grid power: Roughly one-third of hyperscalers and colocation providers said they will be operating fully onsite-powered campuses by 2030, a 22% increase in just six months. “By 2030, onsite power will be the top-ranked solution among developers to minimize development timelines and costs,” the report said.

Bloom Energy’s Natalie Sunderland said data center and AI factory developers can’t afford delays. “Our analysis and survey results show that they’re moving into power‑advantaged regions where capacity can be secured faster, and increasingly designing campuses to operate independently of the grid,” she said. “The surge in AI demand creates a clear opportunity for states that can adapt to support large-scale AI deployments at speed.”

The firm surveyed more than 150 decision-makers across the data center power ecosystem in November 2025, including hyperscalers, colocation developers, utilities, and GPU service providers.