The global AI data centre consumption figure recorded in the annual index, 29.6 gigawatts, explains a vocabulary shift that ran through the year: capacity contracts began being negotiated in power rather than equipment counts.
The reason is physical before it is commercial. Accelerators are bought with money and arrive in weeks; large-scale electrical connections depend on transmission infrastructure, permitting and sometimes new generation, on timelines measured in years.
That reorders the map of where building is possible. Cheap land near nothing doesn't work; what decides is proximity to a substation with spare capacity, which is utility information rather than real estate information.
The effect appeared across the period's announcements, from capacity deals described in gigawatts to trials of transportable data centre modules, proposed precisely to install compute where power already exists.
For anyone renting capacity, that's the structural explanation for the queue. The market lacks neither money nor equipment; it lacks places with contracted power to install what has already been bought.