U.S. Data Center Capacity: Your seat is skewing your numbers. Five ways to forecast DC capacity (and our definitive view)

By far the most frequent question that hits our collective inboxes is "how much data center capacity are we really building? How fast?" Depending on who you ask, you get a wide range of answers. A survey of 63 available forecasts from 40 sources yielded a spread of 59 to 186 GW by 2030. Today's note looks at five different ways to forecast U.S. data center capacity: site-based estimates (the infrastructure seat, generally conservative, 135-167 IT-GW), the incremental growth rate approach (popular in industrials, often skewing higher, 124-242 IT-GW), the hyperscaler-capex method (technology and internet teams, 115-195 IT-GW), the server-based method (semis view, 137-160 IT-GW), and the craft labor ceiling (120-204 IT-GW). Unpacking the pros and cons of each and benchmarking credible comps, we take all of these forecasts into account for our definitive Bernstein estimates: 149 IT-GW by 2030, adding 19 IT-GW (~25 facility GW) in 2027 and 25 IT-GW (~32 facility GW) in 2028. From a data cen