164 GW: AI Power Requests Flood Texas Grid
The AI boom is redrawing the Texas grid and EROCT's new report shows just how fast
Texas is heating up again — not because of weather or bitcoin miners, but because AI developers are flooding the ERCOT grid with power requests at a pace the state has never seen before.
In its System Planning and Weatherization Update released this week, ERCOT revealed numbers that honestly look more like a land rush than a utility report: about 226 GW of new large-load interconnection requests are now in the pipeline. For perspective, that’s up from 63 GW at the end of last year, and roughly 73% of it comes from data center developers building out AI-scale campuses.
And these aren’t small projects. ERCOT highlighted a growing wave of 1-GW-class sites—single campuses equivalent to a large gas plant, but purely for compute.
A few data points worth sitting with:
• 225 large-load requests were filed this year through mid-November alone — already more than the total applications submitted during 2022–2024 combined.
• Total large-load demand seeking interconnection by 2030 has jumped 270% since January, rising by 142 GW in less than a year.
• ERCOT is blunt that both transmission headroom and resource adequacy will dictate how quickly these facilities can actually energize.
This wave is overwhelmingly AI. Bitcoin miners used to be the face of “large flexible load” in Texas, but 2025 is a different story: the compute-cloud giants, hyperscalers, GPU colocators, and independent AI operators are the ones now stretching ERCOT’s planning bandwidth.
Meanwhile, on the supply side…
The generation queue is ballooning too — just not in the way that directly solves the AI load problem.
ERCOT is reviewing 1,999 active generation interconnection requests totaling 432 GW, and 77% of them are solar and battery storage. Gas has grown to 48 GW, but still represents a modest share relative to the tidal wave of intermittent resources entering the queue.
Translation: Load is growing fast, but firm generation is not keeping up at the same pace. Texas hasn’t hit the wall yet, but the shape of the queue points to future tension.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas is already working on new rules that would flag any customer asking for 75 MW or more as a special-handling case — a category that now captures much of the AI boom. ERCOT echoed that future load-forecasting rules will be essential to separate “credible loads” from speculative paper requests.
And ERCOT itself has been sprinting: it has reviewed more than double the number of transmission projects this year compared with 2024.
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