Two massive data centers in Santa Clara sit idle with nearly 100MW of capacity, waiting for the local power grid to catch up with AI's surging electricity demands.
In the heart of Silicon Valley, two freshly constructed data centers designed for the world's most power-hungry computing workloads are standing completely empty. Digital Realty's SJC37 facility and Stack Infrastructure's SVY02A campus in Santa Clara, California, were both built to host tens of megawatts of high-density AI hardware and servers.
The problem is simple but stark: the buildings are finished, but the electricity to power them isn't available. Together, these two facilities represent nearly 100 megawatts of idle capacity that could sit unused for years, according to recent reporting by Bloomberg.
The root cause reveals a growing tension between Silicon Valley's ambitions and its infrastructure. Santa Clara's publicly owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, is racing to expand the local grid to meet surging demand from data center operators. The city has 57 active or in-progress facilities and is investing $450 million in grid upgrades scheduled for completion by 2028. Both data centers are coordinating with the utility to phase in power delivery as upgrades progress, but the timeline remains uncertain. The scale of modern AI clusters, often measured in hundreds of megawatts, is pushing local networks to their limits in ways traditional infrastructure wasn't designed to handle.
And while tech giants like battle, observers and commenters have noted the irony and frustration embedded in this situation. Some point out that California's broader electricity challenges, including seasonal blackouts, make the state a risky bet for data center investment. Others argue that by the time these facilities come online, the hardware inside may already be approaching obsolescence. The sentiment reflects a deeper anxiety about whether regional power grids can keep pace with the explosive growth of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Yet this problem extends far beyond Silicon Valley. Northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the United States, has faced multi-year connection delays as utilities struggle to reinforce high-voltage infrastructure. Regions in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast are reporting wait times of two to five years for new capacity.
Even Microsoft has acknowledged having GPUs sitting idle due to power constraints. The gap between completed buildings and available electricity is widening as AI infrastructure expands faster than transmission projects can be approved and built.
The situation underscores a fundamental mismatch in modern tech development: companies can design, construct, and populate massive data centers in months, but upgrading the electrical infrastructure that powers them takes years of planning, permitting, and construction. Until utilities catch up, some of Silicon Valley's most advanced facilities will remain dark, a stark reminder that even in the age of artificial intelligence, the physical world still sets the pace. And all this happens while tech job losses mount throughout the year.
