Onsite Gas Pipeline for Data Centers Hits 110 GW as Turbines Crack

Developers are building about 110 GW of onsite gas power for data centers, up from 20 GW last summer, according to an October estimate from the analytics firm Cleanview that Latitude Media reported on Oct. 28, 2026. Equipment failures and fuel exposure are now showing up alongside the growth.

Latitude Media said power providers and engineering contractors are fielding more calls from data center developers who have damaged gas turbines and lack the operations and maintenance staff to repair them. The outlet cited Bloomberg for cracked turbines at small U.K. projects and at xAI's Colossus campus in Memphis, Tennessee, where xAI added Tesla batteries to absorb sharp swings in load.

Failures at named sites

Latitude, citing The Information, said the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, developed by Crusoe, has had technical problems with backup gas turbines and cooling equipment. It also cited WUSA9 for a "critical power failure" this summer at the onsite turbine plant of a Vantage data center, VA2, in Loudoun County, Virginia, which ran on backup diesel generators for nearly 24 hours. These are second-hand accounts, and Voltgrid has not verified them independently.

The outlet attributed the problems partly to AI workloads, which can swing power by megawatts within milliseconds and stress turbines. Developers are pairing onsite gas with batteries, and adding uninterruptible power supply systems inside the data hall, to smooth those spikes.

Fuel risk and the experience gap

Fuel is the other exposure. Latitude said Anthropic's IPO filing this week warns of fuel price and pipeline risk as the company shifts to building its own data centers, including a $50 billion investment in Texas and New York. The filing, as described by Latitude, says clean sources such as solar, wind, storage, nuclear and geothermal may not arrive in the quantities or on the timelines it needs.

Sheldon Kimber, CEO of Intersect, the developer Google acquired in late 2025, told Latitude that many new entrants are inexperienced and that the pipeline is crowded with weak projects. Few companies, he said, can deliver gigawatt-scale behind-the-meter plants. Intersect and Google have announced two Texas projects powered mostly by solar, wind and batteries with some gas backup, but have not disclosed their size.

Voltgrid has tracked the same build-out, including Serverfarm's 432 MW Arkansas campus, INNIO's 620 MW Jenbacher engine order and the Switch-backed Tahoe-Reno gas plant. Turbine supply is also tight, as Mitsubishi Power said deliveries now reach around 2031.

What comes next

On the turbine bottleneck, Latitude reported that Elon Musk said on an earnings call that SpaceX, which acquired xAI this year, expects to add at least 10 GW of compute in 2027. He said in-house casting of turbine blades and vanes could secure supply 12 to 18 months faster than competitors. He also said the company is considering solar, wind and other sources.

The 110 GW figure counts projects in development, not capacity in operation, and Cleanview's underlying data was not read for this story. Whether failure rates, fuel costs and a shortage of maintenance crews slow the pipeline is not yet known, since none of the reports quantifies how many onsite plants have failed.