As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates, supply chain leaders are confronting an unexpected constraint: electricity. According to December 2025 research from Gartner, AI-driven demand is rapidly outpacing global energy infrastructure, creating material risks to supply chain continuity, cost stability, and operational resilience.
Gartner projects that global data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, with AI workloads as the primary driver. At the same time, electricity prices are rising at nearly twice the rate of inflation, while the cost of transformers, cables, and critical materials such as copper and aluminum continues to increase. Together, AI adoption, industrial electrification, and population growth are expected to account for roughly 90% of global electricity load growth by the end of the decade, the report noted.
“AI demand is expanding like a high-pressure hose being forced into a century-old energy grid,” the report notes, raising concerns that grid reliability may soon become a strategic constraint rather than a background utility assumption.
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