The gas fleet behind AI demand forecasts is already old
Every forecast of data-centre electricity demand assumes dispatchable gas is there to meet it. Counting the fleet that exists shows how much of it is near the end of a normal service life.
Key figures
6,673 gas-fired stations worldwide, 3,106.4 GW of capacity.
775.7 GW across 2,063 stations has been running 25 years or more, which is 36.7% of the gas capacity that carries a commissioning date.
The United States alone holds 282.6 GW of that older gas.
What the fleet looks like
PowerAtlas lists 6,673 gas-fired stations totalling 3,106.4 GW. Of those, 4,901 stations (2,116.2 GW) carry a commissioning year on or before 2026, and that is the population aged here. A further 309 gas stations carry a date after 2026 and are treated separately as pipeline; about 1,463 carry no year at all.
Age matters for an unglamorous reason. A gas turbine and its heat-recovery train do not stop at a fixed age, but past roughly 25 years an owner is choosing between a major overhaul, an uprate and retirement. That choice competes for the same engineering and supply-chain capacity that new build needs.
Age of the dated capacity
| Age in years | Stations | Capacity (GW) |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 | 953 | 478.7 |
| 10 to 19 | 1,155 | 504.3 |
| 20 to 29 | 1,320 | 567.4 |
| 30 to 39 | 608 | 213.3 |
| 40 or more | 865 | 352.5 |
Adding the bands from 25 years upward gives 775.7 GW across 2,063 stations, or 36.7% of dated gas capacity.
Where the older capacity sits
| Country | Capacity 25 years or older (GW) |
|---|---|
| United States of America | 282.6 |
| Russia | 111.3 |
| Japan | 48.3 |
| United Kingdom | 17.5 |
| Germany | 17.0 |
| Saudi Arabia | 15.7 |
| Egypt | 15.0 |
| Thailand | 14.7 |
The concentration is the finding. Whether a grid can serve AI is usually argued nationally, and on this measure the United States carries more ageing gas than the next four countries on the list put together.
What this does and does not show
This is a count of installed plant and its commissioning year. It is not a retirement forecast, and it says nothing about how hard any station is run. A 40-year-old peaker that starts twice a month is in a different position from a 25-year-old unit on baseload.
The honest reading is narrower than the headline. Of the gas capacity that carries a date, 36.7% is old enough that its owner faces an overhaul-or-retire decision inside the same decade in which AI demand is forecast to arrive. Whether that capacity is still there then is a question about capital and supply chains rather than about megawatts on a map.
Sources and method
- Gas fleet, commissioning years and capacity counted from PowerAtlas, an open directory of the world’s power stations, on 2026-09-25.
- Ages are calendar years from each station’s recorded commissioning year to 2026.
- Stations without a commissioning year are excluded from every age figure and stated separately above.
- Global Power Plant Database, World Resources Institute, the largest single upstream source for the station records used here.
- Global Oil and Gas Plant Tracker and the coal and nuclear trackers, Global Energy Monitor, which supply several thousand further station records and much of the status and commissioning data.
- Capacity values are reconciled across the source records, Wikidata nameplate capacity and, for Brazil, the ANEEL SIGA official registry.