Data centers now consume 6 percent of all electricity in the United States. Two years ago that figure was considerably lower. The jump is almost entirely driven by AI.

The biggest facilities now draw as much power as small cities. Global data center consumption has hit 67.7 gigawatts, a 36 percent increase in two years. The US accounts for 43 percent of that total. In Germany, data centers consume 9.5 percent of national electricity. In the UK, 5.8 percent.

A new report from the International Data Center Authority identifies a threshold: significant community and political pushback tends to begin once data centers surpass 5 percent of a country's power supply. The US crossed that line.

Hundreds of state-level bills to regulate data centers have been introduced. In Maine, the legislature passed a bill halting construction of large data centers until 2027 before the governor vetoed it. Developers in Northern Virginia's Data Center Alley, already the densest concentration of facilities in the world, cannot launch new projects until 2032 due to energy scarcity.

Water is equally contested. A single large facility can consume as much water daily as 6,500 households.

There is also waste baked into the existing system. An estimated 13 percent of US cloud consumption comes from abandoned test environments and unused applications that continue drawing power around the clock without doing anything useful.

Annual global data center spending is approaching $1 trillion, with up to $700 billion anticipated in the US alone this year. The industry shows no sign of slowing.

Whether the grid can absorb what's coming, and how hard communities push back, may determine whether the AI boom continues or runs into a wall it can't compute its way through.

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