Microsoft has pulled its funding from a supercomputer at Nscale's roughly $2.7 billion data center in Loughton, England, which was set to be Britain's largest, after the site was told it would not receive grid power until the 2030s. The facility was to house more than 23,000 Nvidia chips arriving in early 2027, and formed part of a $30 billion UK investment Microsoft announced in September 2025. The company told the BBC the decision "relates to a single site" and said it remains committed to its partnership with Nscale.
Nscale, which is backed by Nvidia and markets itself as the only full-stack sovereign AI infrastructure provider in the UK, said it is "exploring alternative power sources for the site" and that its grid problem in London leaves its deals in the US, Norway and Portugal untouched. The withdrawal is a concrete example of the constraint now shaping the AI buildout: not chips, but the electricity to run them, and the years-long wait to connect it.
The timelines are the story. In the US, projects seeking to connect to the PJM grid, which runs from Illinois to New Jersey and covers Northern Virginia's data center alley, now take more than eight years on average, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. The International Energy Agency puts grid-connection waits across the EU at two to 10 years, and projects global data center electricity demand will more than double, from 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 to roughly 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. When power arrives years after the hardware, a site that can energize in 18 months beats a cheaper parcel that cannot.
Where Microsoft walked away in Loughton, other operators are paying to build the power themselves. Google has proposed a deal with Xcel Energy around a 780-megawatt data center in Pine Island, Minnesota, under which it would finance 1,400 megawatts of wind, 200 of solar and 300 of battery storage, more capacity than the data center will use, with the new supply serving all local customers. Google would pay for at least 75% of its contracted capacity even if it uses less, and owe up to eight years of minimum demand charges if it exits early. The agreement is pending approval by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.
Nuclear is drawing the largest commitments. Constellation Energy became the preferred supplier this month for both Amazon, in a $3 billion, 20-year deal to expand the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, and Google, in a $4.3 billion agreement across six plants in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Those echo Microsoft's 2024 deal to restart Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Unit 1 and Vistra's January agreements with Meta for more than 2,100 megawatts in Ohio. The caveat shared by all of them is time: the Calvert Cliffs additions are not expected online before 2030, and most of the restarts and upgrades land between 2027 and 2034.
The politics are hardening around these projects as the bills grow. A June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos survey found 57% of US respondents opposed a data center being built locally and 77% worried AI growth would raise their electricity rates. That backlash is pushing the cost onto the companies: Ohio regulators now require large data centers to pay for at least 85% of the power they reserve. What remains unresolved is whether hyperscaler-financed generation genuinely lowers household bills, as Google argues, or whether, as utility watchdogs counter, utilities will keep favoring the expensive new construction that earns them the highest regulated returns.