Wednesday, 30 September 2026

AI infrastructure companies can no longer self-fund their pace of expansion and are turning to debt, structured financing and GPU-backed collateral to bridge the gap, according to a Mondaq report on the sector's financing problem.

The report identifies a timing gap between when capital is deployed and when cash flow is generated, and describes this as creating real risk even if the most bullish assumptions about AI demand prove true.

The strain on capital coincides with rising power demand from the sector. European data-centre electricity consumption stands at about 70 TWh and could reach around 115 TWh by 2030, according to European Commission forecasts cited by Euronews.

New York now has 28 planned data center projects in development, together adding up to 9.74 GW of potential new electrical demand, based on a September 2026 count from energy-infrastructure tracker Cleanview.

Cleanview put the annual draw of that pipeline at roughly 85 TWh, the figure the projects would reach if the full capacity ran around the clock.

Against that pipeline, Cleanview counts just 264 MW of data center capacity currently running in the state under its methodology, leaving the proposed total almost 37 times larger than the operating fleet it tracks.

State officials reported in July that data center load requests in the New York Independent System Operator interconnection queue had reached nearly 12 GW, with more than 8 GW of that filed during 2025.

Civil society groups have petitioned the South African Human Rights Commission over limited public awareness of how much water data centers consume in South Africa, according to Semafor Net Zero. The country hosts 60 data centers and is contending with climate-change-induced drought.

Concerns about the potential water use of data centers are rising across Africa, Semafor Net Zero reported.

Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, according to Semafor Net Zero. A study modeling water use in African data centers found that ChatGPT-4 used up to 60 liters of water to produce a 10-page paper, Semafor Net Zero reported.

Apex Clean Energy and Meta signed a power purchase agreement tied to a solar project in Gonzales County, Texas, according to Inside Climate News. The deal lets the technology company financially benefit from the energy the project generates.

The 144-megawatt project, called Starling Solar, would not have been built without Meta's backing, the developer told Inside Climate News. Under the agreement, Meta will claim all environmental attributes from Starling Solar's output.

That accounting lets Meta offset some of the gas-fired energy powering its data centers when it tallies its electricity use, according to Inside Climate News, though the gas plants carry climate and local air-pollution impacts regardless.

Meta plans to power a new data center in El Paso, Texas, with a 366-megawatt gas-fired plant, Inside Climate News reported.