People really don’t like AI data centers.

Politicians are running against them. A recent Gallup poll showed 71% of Americans oppose them. Several counties and states have proposed or passed laws to ban them.

But this notion that AI data centers are quickly popping up everywhere is belied by the fact that their construction faces massive hurdles – regardless of whether anyone wants them in their backyard or not.
Delays

Construction delays are nothing new: Historically, around 72% of scheduled data center capacity comes online on time, according to Goldman Sachs.

But only about half of the AI computing capacity scheduled to activate between now and 2028 via data center construction is actually expected to come online by its target date, Goldman Sachs said. Data centers typically take 18 to 24 months to build, but completion times are getting stretched as delays are getting worse.

Despite $750 billion in AI infrastructure investments this year alone, according to JPMorgan, data centers are struggling to get shovels in the ground. About 60% of data center capacity planned for completion in 2027 hasn’t even begun construction, according to JPMorgan. Another 7% of projects that have gotten underway have since been delayed.

The planned American data center boom is absolutely massive.

The United States had 5,427 data centers at the end of last year, according to Stanford University’s AI Index Report. That number is set to nearly double: AI companies have announced plans for 3,969 new US data centers, according to Aterio, a data center research company.

Of those, just 802 are currently under construction.

There’s reason to believe many of those nearly 4,000 planned data centers were never real to begin with: Developers typically submit many simultaneous applications across multiple regions only to pick the most viable one, noted Goldman Sachs.

That’s why, of the 565 gigawatts of computing power AI companies are currently planning (more than 10 times today’s power), Columbia Business School real estate professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh expects just 180 gigawatts to actually get built over the next decade. Two-thirds of the pipeline is “implausible,” he says.

That still amounts to about $10 trillion of investment – 50% bigger than the next-biggest spending boom from the 19th century railroad expansion.