EIA's September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook projects the West South Central region (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas) will drive nearly 20% of total U.S. electricity sales growth in 2026 and nearly 40% in 2027, propelled largely by data center development despite Texas's grid-connection pause for new data center projects
EIA forecasts West South Central electricity sales of 761 billion kilowatt-hours in 2026 and 790 billion in 2027, below its August forecast of 765 billion and 829 billion. The region still leads growth even though Texas has paused connecting new data centres to the grid for a regulatory audit of proposed projects.
Verified 2026-09-18
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Texas and its neighbours are becoming a centre of data centre building, and of new power demand.
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- American Electric Power, one of the largest US utilities, which counts hyperscalers and manufacturers among its new large customers, signed fresh load commitments in the third quarter of 2026 and now expects its contracted extra load to reach 84 GW by 2031 AEP signed 15 GW of new load commitments in a single quarter
- AI data centres worldwide reached a power capacity comparable to New York State at peak demand in 2025, which Stanford's AI Index puts at 29.6 gigawatts
- OpenAI does not disclose GPT-4o's resource footprint, so Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report turned to independent researchers' estimates of the water needed to cool the servers behind it — as much as 1.58 million kilolitres a year — more than 1.2 million people drink annually
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