In January, Latitude Media senior reporter Catherine Boudreau wrote about “the great electron race:” the speed-to-power push from some of the world’s wealthiest companies that would define the coming months. Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” approach had collided with the realities of the U.S. grid in 2025, she explained. The question for 2026, then, was how the deep-pocketed tech industry would find a way around the wait for electricity.
The potential workarounds run the gamut: on-site gas turbines, millions of dollars poured into making data centers flexible, and off-grid fuel cells running on natural gas that might have to be trucked in after a planned pipeline ran into opposition.
But as the year progressed — and as the midterms approached — the political problems facing data centers became at least as thorny as the engineering ones. Democratic candidates at all levels of government rode into office on a blue wave fueled by frustration over rising utility bills (and with monopoly utilities themselves) and promises to rein in data center development.
But many of the regulatory decisions that could help reconcile that backlash are unfinished. That leaves everyone in the market in an uncomfortable position heading into 2027: Utilities, now under enhanced scrutiny, are making commitments to serve new loads and developing tariffs, while the broader rules governing those commitments are still taking shape. The questions of how much can get built, on what timetable, and with whose money are still open.
To get a sense of what’s been announced, what’s actually under contract, and how those contracted projects will get online, I turned to Latitude Intelligence, which launched its new research platform this week, for data on utility load commitments, project timelines, and generation procurements. Here are the numbers that sum up the outlook for 2027:
120 GW
That’s the amount of signed data center load Latitude Intelligence is tracking (53 utility territories at launch, though the list is soon to expand), meaning projects for which there’s an executed agreement to take service. Compare that to 22 GW of currently operating data center load across the same footprint: Signed load is around 5.5 times what is currently online today. This presents one of the key open questions heading into 2027: Can new generation and interconnection — plus maybe some flexibility and increased utilization on the margins — keep up with the load already under contract?
The rules for connecting that load, which could influence project timelines and power procurement strategies, are still being written in most of the country. The process has been particularly bumpy in PJM, where projected data center growth has collided with a capacity shortfall and disputes over consumer protections and state authority.
Getting rules on the books, however, doesn’t necessarily make the resulting service easier to finance. This tension is on display in the Southwest Power Pool’s CHILLS pathway, a conditional transmission service that lets customers connect before firm service is available, but gives the grid operator open-ended permission to curtail them. As Latitude Intelligence analyst Victoria Yang wrote this week, that approach, already approved by federal regulators, risks moving data center flexibility into bilateral contracts, which will be priced and dispatched out of public view.
“A hyperscaler can live with real-time curtailment. What it cannot underwrite, however, is not knowing whether the number is 20 hours or 400 hours each year for up to seven years,” Yang wrote. “A rational hyperscaler will only be willing to experiment with flexibility in contexts where it can set the terms. That means that bilateral utility contracts with defined call limits and on-site generation will continue to be the default.”
Meanwhile, loads that hold out for firm service are ending up waiting for transmission upgrades — and depending on how a region allocates those costs, ratepayers could end up covering part of the bill.
There are several near-term deadlines for writing these interconnection rules: The five regional grid operators must respond to FERC’s large load show-cause orders by November 16, with SPP’s response due November 20.
537 GW
That’s the total amount of reported data center load across the territories Latitude Intelligence currently tracks, or about 4.5 times the 120 GW of signed load described above.
That wide gap means that a huge portion of the projects appearing in utility pipelines have not yet crossed the threshold into an executed agreement to take service. This is where there’s the most room for the outlook to change, with wide-reaching consequences: In early November, utilities in PJM’s footprint dramatically reduced their large load forecasts. According to Jeffries analysts, those revisions could shrink the target of PJM’s planned backstop procurement down to as little as 630 MW.
Political dynamics add another source of uncertainty here. Georgia Power, for example, has one of the largest gaps between reported and signed load. Latitude Intelligence counts the utility’s signed load pipeline at 12.8 GW, compared to the utility’s 80.1 GW of reported load. The state’s Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms has promised a temporary ban on new data center approvals, pending a review of energy costs and environmental impacts, a change that could introduce another hurdle for proposed projects.
The midterms also brought a major shift at the state’s Public Service Commission, which also flipped blue for the first time in three decades. The incoming commissioners have signaled they will scrutinize Georgia Power’s gas-heavy expansion and frequent rate increases.
We’ll be watching the utility’s large load report, expected by the end of this month, for any changes in demand in its pipeline; in the longer term we’re eyeing how much infrastructure state regulators will authorize utilities to build to meet it.
235%
That’s the amount of signed load in AEP Ohio territory, as compared to the utility’s current peak. In other words, the new customers under contract represent significantly more demand than the utility currently sees at its busiest times.
Ohio is a particularly interesting case study for the data center buildout, and for the political fallout that has accompanied it. As Caroline Golin, chief growth and policy officer at NRG, explained on a recent episode of Open Circuit, Ohio had everything hyperscalers were looking for, including an infrastructure backbone, existing workforce, and abandoned industrial sites: “It was the perfect place to start building out cloud, and once you start building out cloud there you want to build your big hyperscaler compute there.”
But in the midterms, Ohio voters weighed in on 21 local data center-related measures, and in every single case, favored restricting development. A proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit the construction of certain data centers statewide is in the process of gathering signatures and could appear on ballots next fall.
That’s a warning sign to other states, Golin said. It also highlights a tension for incoming governors, because campaign trail promises to reign in data centers could put economic development decisions, a key gubernatorial remit, in the hands of counties.
AEP Ohio has the most signed load of any territory that Latitude Intelligence tracks, but similar statistics are at play in a handful of other regions: In Indiana, NIPSCO’s signed data center pipeline sits at 169% of its current peak load while in Pennsylvania, PPL’s is 145%.
33 months
It takes an average of 33 months, or just under three years, for a project to go from announcement to first power for a data center, as modeled across 14 data center projects energized since late 2021. Based on that historical average, most of the data centers that come online next year would have been announced in 2024: long before the midterms, when the AI boom was still in early days.
(That said, the data here is a little sparse because the sample size is small: Our platform has announcement-to-power data for 19 projects, with outliers excluded from this average.)
37 GW
The volume of generation procurements currently open or under consideration across the six largest utilities tracked in our platform. This is the supply-side counterpart to the signed load figure: a measure of how utilities are soliciting projects to serve that load.
Dominion, for example, is seeking up to 7.3 GW of dispatchable generation, with final submissions due December 18, and in-service dates extending through 2036. Georgia Power is pursuing another 2 to 6 GW of new capacity, and Xcel has multi-gigawatt procurements underway across its regions. Likewise, AEP has disclosed solicitations of 4 GW each for Indiana Michigan Power and Public Service Company of Oklahoma.
Those procurements aren’t a direct parallel to the 120 GW of signed load Latitude Intelligence is tracking. But they are an example of utilities starting to turn demand commitments into plans for new supply.
That said, a solicitation for new generation isn’t an operating power plant, just like a signed service agreement isn’t an energized data center. Heading into next year, with new leaders across federal, state, and local levels focused on bringing down costs, the key question will once again be how quickly, and within what guardrails, each becomes concrete.
