Electricity Is a Boardroom Issue Now: Data Centers, Power Costs, and the New Operating Risk

For decades, electricity was an input you managed. In 2026, it’s a constraint you negotiate.

AI-driven data center expansion is pushing energy systems into the spotlight. Microsoft just launched a U.S. initiative aimed at limiting data center impacts on power costs and water, including commitments to cover its power usage costs more fully and publish water metrics by region. That’s not corporate virtue. That’s a signal: communities are pushing back, and utilities are strained.

Behind the headlines is the real business risk: load growth forecasts are rising fast. One national analysis found that utilities’ five-year peak load growth forecasts jumped from 24 GW to 166 GW over three years, and total electricity use forecasts imply large growth by 2030—data centers being a key driver.

When demand surges faster than infrastructure, three things happen:

1. interconnection delays,

2. volatile pricing, and

3. politics.

Interconnection is becoming a bottleneck. Reporting on the data-center buildout increasingly points to multi-year waits tied to queue backlogs and upgrade requirements. That delay is not abstract—it can kill site selection, construction schedules, and investor confidence.

For business leaders, the takeaway is simple: power is now part of underwriting. Whether you’re building a data center, a cold-storage facility, a manufacturing plant, or a high-density mixed-use project, you need an “energy readiness” plan: who supplies the power, what upgrades are required, how long interconnection takes, what your rate exposure is, and what demand response or onsite generation can do for resilience.

And yes—this is where zoning and development collide with business. The projects that win will be the ones that pair entitlement with infrastructure: substation proximity, transmission capacity, utility relationships, and water strategy.

The best operators are already adapting:

• Negotiating utility agreements earlier,

• Structuring phased load commitments,

• Investing in efficiency to reduce peak draw,

• Considering microgrids, storage, or behind-the-meter generation where feasible.

If you’re not in the data center business, you’re still in the blast radius. AI load concentrates regionally, and when the grid tightens locally, everyone pays—manufacturers, office towers, multifamily, hospitals.

The new competitive advantage is being the company that can say: “We don’t just have land. We have power.”