The U.S. electrical equipment market for data centers could more than triple by decade’s end, a sign of the headwinds facing the artificial intelligence build-out, according to a new analysis.
Research firm Wood Mackenzie reported Tuesday that the market for technology such as grid transformers to help power AI factories could balloon from $20 billion to $65 billion by 2030. The report also offered a warning for the data center boom, suggesting its progress could be thwarted by an inadequate amount of equipment.
“Data centers are fundamentally different from any load the electrical equipment industry has supported before,” Ben Boucher, a senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement.
Data centers are now expected to make up 40 percent of the U.S. power equipment market by 2030, up from less than 2 percent at the start of the decade. The lead time for supplies has been stretched to 18 to 36 months, a timeline that is pushing equipment prices as much as 20 percent higher and threatening progress on AI infrastructure, Wood Mackenzie said.
