Datacenters: How We are Tracking the Overbuild

Datacenter Overbuild

Datacenters: How We are Tracking the Overbuild

Andy DeVries, CFA: Head of Investment Grade, Head of Utilities - CreditSights
Nick Moglia, CFA: Senior Analyst, REITs, Utilities and Refiners - CreditSights
Diego Espinosa Valdez: Analyst, Utilities - CreditSights

14 January 2026

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Insights into Datacenters: How We are Tracking the Overbuild, including:

  • The Datacenter Overbuild Thesis Explained: Discover why CreditSights projects the U.S. will significantly overbuild datacenter capacity by the end of the decade, with utilities already committing 189% of 2030 demand estimates.
  • Supply vs. Demand Mismatch: Learn how 112 GW of firm utility grid connections compares to just 94 GW of consensus 2030 demand forecasts, revealing a potential oversupply crisis before any pipeline projects come online.
  • Tracking Methodology Unveiled: Access the comprehensive framework for monitoring both supply-side utility grid connect requests across major operators (AEP, PPL, Exelon) and demand-side third-party forecasts from Bloomberg, S&P Global, and investment banks.
  • Natural Gas Market Implications: Understand why datacenters could add 5 Bcf/d of natural gas demand by 2030, making forward gas prices the most asymmetric way to play datacenter growth scenarios.
  • Investment-Grade Intelligence: Get actionable insights on which utilities face the greatest exposure, with detailed backlogs showing AEP at 22 GW signed, Oncor at 9 GW, and total potential pipeline reaching 572 GW across the sector.

Executive Summary

  • Our utilities/power team has published many times on our strong view that the U.S. will significantly overbuild datacenter capacity towards the end of the decade and this report walks through our thought process, how we track both the supply/demand of datacenters, provides the tables for each and hopefully sets clients up to track the overbuild on their own. As we highlighted in our Ten Themes for 2026 report, we expect our Overbuild thesis to go from a fairly unique contrarian view now to more mainstream in 2026.

  • The impetus for this report is to create a long-shelf life report to send to clients when we get the numerous clients emails asking us to “walk us through the overbuild thesis” and/or “how are you tracking the overbuild” every time we publish on it. It is really quite simple and maybe the reason a lot of folks aren’t doing it themselves is because it spans two, until recently, drastically different sectors: utilities/power on the supply side and technology on the demand side. At the end of the day, our overbuild view is just based on incredibly simple math.

  • On the demand side, we use third party estimates from wall street, consultants, Bloomberg and other experts for 2030 and 2035 AI and datacenter (AI/DC) demand for electricity. We let them do the heavy lifting of forecasting chip volumes, end-use inference demand and hyperscaler training requirements. We then break these down by GW of capacity or TWhs of demand and then make them comparable by applying a capacity factor. We then subtract out 2024 AI/DC demand of 35 GW (GS says Dec ’25 was 45 GW so we might move to 2025YE soon if we see more ’25YE estimates). We are tracking TWh forecasts as well but this report is sticking with GW of capacity.

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