MIT Technology Review recently released a powerful series on the future of AI and energy. The numbers are telling—and the implications for data centers are urgent.
By 2028, data centers could account for up to 12% of total U.S. electricity use, according to projections from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That’s a dramatic shift in a short window.
Looking out over the next decade, U.S. electricity demand is expected to increase by 1,000 to 1,200 billion kilowatt-hours—a 24% to 29% jump. Here’s how that increase breaks down:
- ~50% from the electrification of vehicles
- ~30% from electrified buildings and industry
- ~22% from AI and data centers
While AI’s share may seem modest, it’s the most urgent part of the equation. Unlike vehicles or buildings, AI’s energy demand is surging now—spiky, unpredictable, and geographically concentrated. It’s already straining grids and prompting calls to restart fossil-fired power plants.
And this is just the beginning.
As the MIT team notes, today’s AI workloads are relatively lightweight. But tomorrow’s systems—agentic, multimodal, always-on—will push infrastructure further. The challenge isn’t just scale. It’s volatility. And traditional tools simply weren’t designed for this new paradigm.
Verdigris: Built for the New Game
In the old game, energy was expendable.
In the new game, energy is the constraint.
Data centers were once built to contain and control. Keep the lights on. Plan for the worst. Overprovision everything. But that playbook—crafted for a world of predictable loads—is already showing its cracks.
AI has redefined the rules.
Now, watts are the limiting factor—not space or compute.
Verdigris is the nervous system for this new era.
We turn static infrastructure into intelligent systems—aware, adaptive, and orchestrated in real time.
We don’t just monitor. We enable discovery of stranded capacity, prediction of power bottlenecks, simulation of future constraints, and dynamic alignment between electrical infrastructure and business logic.
Because survival in the AI era isn’t about squeezing more from the old ways of operating.
It’s about building a new one—where infrastructure thinks, reacts, and evolves.
🔗 Read more from MIT Technology Review
