1,066 Gigawatts of Data Centers Are Queuing for the Grid. Utilities Want Proof They Exist.

US developers have requested 1,066 gigawatts of grid connections — about 83% of the country's entire generating capacity. Utilities are now demanding collateral, decade-long contracts and hard evidence the projects are real.

Exelon spent much of this year asking a question that sounds almost philosophical for a power company: how do you know what's real? The Chicago-based utility, which runs electric companies across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, put it to data center developers directly. The answer arrived as a number. Its "high probability" data center load fell nearly 40 percent, from 18 gigawatts at the end of 2025 to about 11 gigawatts in the second quarter. Its wider pipeline of projects under study dropped from roughly 43 gigawatts to 25.

The mechanism was a transmission security agreement — a contract that binds a prospective customer to credit obligations, committed revenue contributions and shortfall payments if a project stalls. Exelon began requiring them. A large share of the queue that had been happy to hold a place for free turned out to be much less willing to put capital behind the request.

The scale of that queue is the story. US data center developers have requested 1,066 gigawatts of grid connections, according to Wood Mackenzie analysis reported by Bloomberg — roughly 83 percent of the country's entire utility-scale generating capacity at the end of 2025. Wood Mackenzie expects grid operators to actually serve about 28 percent of it: 12 percent with firm service commitments, plus another 17 percent that look likely to proceed. The remainder, an estimated 768 gigawatts, is what the firm characterises as largely speculative.

Some of that gap is duplication. Developers who don't yet know which utility can deliver power fastest file the same project with several of them and keep every option open until one pans out. Some of it is blunter than that. Private equity funds, land brokers and shell companies have been claiming queue positions without site control, a construction timeline or even a signed customer, betting that land with a power connection attached will eventually find a buyer. The industry calls them phantom data centers, and the phenomenon is old enough that trade press was writing about it in 2025. What changed this year is that utilities started pricing it.

Jeanne Jones, Exelon's chief financial officer, told the Journal that a typical request used to run around 50 megawatts and now often exceeds 1,000. "How do you know what's real?" she said, describing the question she kept fielding, internally and externally.

Utilities care because grid costs are shared. If a utility builds a substation and a transmission line for a project that never appears, everyone else on the network helps pay for them. PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator, spanning 13 states and the District of Columbia, cleared its 2028-29 capacity auction at the $325 per megawatt-day price cap and still finished about 6.8 gigawatts short of its 20 percent reserve margin target — a wider gap than the previous auction, which produced the grid operator's first-ever shortfall.

So the terms have tightened. Average minimum contract lengths for large customers have risen to roughly 10.8 years from 4.6 before 2024, according to filings aggregated by Halcyon and cited by the Journal, and utilities are charging engineering study fees before they will even model a request. Exelon's $41 billion capital plan through 2029 is unchanged, which is its own kind of verdict: a 40 percent cut in expected data center load did not shrink the spending programme.

Underbuilding carries its own risk, and utilities know it. Transformers can take years to arrive, and a grid that says no to a real project loses it to another state. That asymmetry is why the utilities that do accept a customer are locking it in for a decade or more rather than sizing the system around what Lindsey Short of the Ohio Manufacturers' Association called "the most optimistic number on somebody's spreadsheet."

Regulators are moving on a parallel track. On Wednesday, Consumer Reports and Telemark Energy Consulting published a paper identifying a dozen separate mechanisms by which a data center can shift costs onto ordinary ratepayers — direct, indirect and risk-based — including ones that survive even when a project builds its own generation on site. "Regulators and legislators must account for all of these potential cost drivers when developing policies to ensure that large data center projects don't leave hardworking Americans footing the bill," said Chris Harto, the group's sustainability advocacy manager. The paper's framework asks for binding contracts that match the scale and useful life of the infrastructure built on a project's behalf, so that a delayed or downsized campus does not leave stranded assets behind.

What nobody can yet say is how much of the AI power rush is real. The queue says 1,066 gigawatts. The contracts say 28 percent. The difference between those two figures is the largest single unknown in the American electricity system, and it is being resolved the way a lender resolves it: by asking to see the money first. Households are the ones standing behind the loan.

Sources: TechRadar, Utility Dive — Exelon, Utility Dive — PJM auction, Capacity Global, POWER Magazine, Consumer Reports