Big Tech's capital spending rose fivefold since 2019. US electricity demand rose 6.5 percent — and Virginia's commercial load 55 percent
Four companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — spent $357 billion on property and equipment in their last fiscal years, against $69 billion in 2019, as filed with the SEC. Over the same years US retail electricity sales grew from 3,811 to 4,058 terawatt-hours. The growth is not evenly spread: Texas added 90 TWh, Virginia 26, and thirteen states sold less electricity in 2025 than in 2019.
Cite as: FACTANKER, https://factanker.com/record/big-tech-capex-fivefold-us-electricity-demand-six-percent
The question behind every data-center headline is simple: how much more electricity is the United States actually using, and where? We answer it from three filed sources — the SEC cash-flow statements of the four largest cloud builders, the Energy Information Administration's retail sales by state and sector, and the FERC Form 1 reports of the utilities that have to build the wires — with the filed value linked behind every number.
The spending
In 2019 Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft together reported $69.4 billion of payments for property and equipment. In their latest full fiscal years the same four reported $357.5 billion: Amazon $131.8 billion (2025), Alphabet $91.5 billion (2025), Meta $69.7 billion (2025) and Microsoft $64.5 billion (fiscal year to June 2025). Microsoft's fiscal year to June 2026 already shows $116.0 billion. That is a fivefold increase in six years, as filed in the companies' own 10-K statements.
The demand
US retail electricity sales were 3,811 TWh in 2019 and 4,058 TWh in 2025, up 6.5 percent, after a dip to 3,718 TWh in 2020. The twelve months to July 2026 reached 4,089 TWh, 1.2 percent above the twelve months before. By sector, commercial sales — the class that includes data centers — rose from 1,361 to 1,494 TWh (+9.7 percent), residential from 1,440 to 1,515 (+5.2 percent) and industrial from 1,002 to 1,042 (+4.0 percent).
Where it lands
Of the 247 TWh added nationally between 2019 and 2025, Texas alone accounts for 90 TWh (+21.0 percent) and Virginia for 26 TWh (+22.2 percent). Florida (+17.5 TWh), Georgia (+14.3), Arizona (+13.6), Ohio (+13.4) and Oregon (+11.2, or 22.1 percent) follow. The fastest relative growth is in North Dakota (+40.7 percent) and New Mexico (+26.9 percent). Thirteen of the fifty-one jurisdictions sold less electricity in 2025 than in 2019.
Virginia, home of the Northern Virginia data-center corridor, shows the pattern most clearly: its commercial sales rose from 54.0 to 83.6 TWh, plus 55 percent, while the state's average commercial price moved from 8.18 to 9.55 cents per kilowatt-hour and the all-sector price from 9.52 to 11.41 cents.
The wires
The utilities that must connect that load report their capital spending to FERC. The 215 investor-owned utilities filing Form 1 reported $188.8 billion of cash outflows for plant in 2025, up from $105.7 billion in 2019 (195 filers). Virginia Electric and Power, Dominion's utility, went from $3.1 billion in 2019 to $9.0 billion in 2024 and $6.7 billion in 2025.
Jobs, not where the power goes
The data-center industry itself (NAICS 518210, computing infrastructure providers, data processing and web hosting) employed 483,804 people in 2024, up from 344,059 in 2019 and 276,843 in 2014, in 55,256 establishments, at an average weekly wage of $3,746. But the jobs sit where the engineers are, not where the power goes: King County, Washington (20,610), San Francisco (17,285) and Manhattan (16,579) lead; Loudoun County, Virginia, with the largest concentration of data-center capacity in the country, reports 1,550 employees in the industry. The footprint of AI in the economy is measured in megawatt-hours and capital, not in headcount.
What this is and is not
Capital spending is each company's "payments to acquire property, plant and equipment" (Amazon: "productive assets") from the SEC XBRL filings, fiscal years as filed; it covers all property, not only data centers. Electricity sales are EIA retail sales to ultimate customers by state and sector (Form EIA-861M/861), 2025 values as published in October 2026. Utility capital spending is FERC Form 1, Schedule 120, "cash outflows for plant", via the Public Utility Data Liberation project (Catalyst Cooperative, CC-BY-4.0); amounts reported with a negative sign in the pre-2021 format were normalised to outflows. Employment is BLS QCEW, private ownership, annual averages; counties with suppressed values are omitted. Nothing here attributes a kilowatt-hour to a specific company.