Compute and Power Monitor
The compute buildout is usually covered as a technology story. It is now large enough to be a macroeconomic one. This monitor follows the money from capital commitment through to grid load, household electricity bills and the share of measured output growth it accounts for.
Sources: Hyperscaler 2026 capex guidance, February 2026 for the February 2026 guidance round; Financial Times capex tally, via Tom's Hardware, April 2026 for the revised calendar-year figures compiled after first quarter results. Microsoft's calendar 2026 figure was set at 190 billion dollars, well above the 152 billion average analyst estimate, with about 25 billion attributed by the company to higher memory and component costs. Not all of this spending is data centres.
Sources: IEA, Energy and AI: energy demand from AI; IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI, executive summary. The 2030 base case is about 3 percent of projected global electricity consumption. Consumption in accelerated servers, the AI-driven component, is projected to grow around 30 percent a year against 9 percent for conventional servers.
Source: Deloitte estimates as summarised in PJM capacity market analysis, January 2026. The shift matters commercially because inference load is proportional to usage rather than to model development, which changes the shape of the demand curve utilities have to plan around.
Source: IEA, Energy and AI: energy demand from AI. The United States and China together account for close to 80 percent of global growth in data centre electricity consumption to 2030.
Where it shows up in the rest of the economy
| Channel | Estimated magnitude | Note | Source link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer spending | -0.2pp | Drag on real consumer spending growth in 2026 and 2027 from higher electricity prices, larger for lower-income households | gspublishing.com |
| GDP growth, net | -0.1pp | Consumption drag partly offset by higher utility capital spending | gspublishing.com |
| US household electricity prices | +32% | Level relative to 2019, with larger increases in data centre intensive regions | cepr.org |
| PJM capacity market | $9.3bn | Price increase in the 2025-26 auction attributed to data centre load, implying roughly 18 dollars a month in western Maryland | avidsolutionsinc.com |
| Share of US GDP | ~5% | AI-related capital formation as a share of output, a level last seen in the late 1990s technology boom | betafinch.com |
Magnitudes are the estimating institution's own, not Quantia's. They are not additive: the first two rows describe the same mechanism at different points in the accounts. Sources: Goldman Sachs, macroeconomic spillovers from AI electricity demand, February 2026; CEPR, powering the digital economy; PJM capacity market analysis, January 2026; AI capital formation and Q1 2026 US GDP.