According to Seeking Alpha, Duke Energy CEO Harry Sideris stated that electricity demand growth rates will reach up to 10 times the levels seen over the past decades, driven by the rise of AI data centers and new factories and manufacturing facilities. Sideris noted that the company has never witnessed such a scale of load growth, a trend reshaping expectations across the energy industry.

This surge is primarily fueled by the construction of high-performance computing facilities, reflecting the substantial physical infrastructure dependency of AI technology. For energy providers, this means accelerating grid modernization and expanding power generation capacity to meet the escalating electricity consumption from data centers and industrial manufacturing, simultaneously triggering a new cycle of investment in energy infrastructure.