In August 2025, a 15m long, 318t Mitsubishi Power M501JAC simple-cycle gas turbine arrive dat the Plant Yates electrical power facility near Newnan, GA, USA(
Fig. 1) [
1]. Once this turbine and two others like it are installed and operating in 2027, they will allow the plant to generate an additional 1.3 GW of electricity[
1].
The plant’s owner, Georgia Power, was fortunate in only having to wait two years for the first turbine to be delivered. As demand for new natural gas-fueled power plants has climbed, wait times for large turbines like the M501JAC have ballooned to as many as seven years, with the average now around five years [
2]. In the past, the backlog was typically one to three years, so "it is a newer situation," said Bobby Noble, senior program manager for gas tur-bine research and development (R&D) at the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit that investigates new technologies for electricity generation and delivery, in Charlotte, NC, USA.
Several factors are driving up demand for gas turbines for power plants, including the retirement of coal-burning genera-tors—that is Georgia Power’s motivation for installing the new tur-bines (
Fig. 2)—and the growing electrification of economic sectors such as transportation [
2,
3]. Another major contributor is the soar-ing electricity use of data centers, spurred in part by artificial intel-ligence (AI) [
4,
5]. Data centers could account for between 6.7% and 12.0% of US power use by 2028, according to predictions from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, USA [
6]. Given that these facilities only consumed 1.8% of US power in 2018, "that is a huge increase," said Stephen Lynch, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Center for Gas Turbine Research, Education, and Outreach at Penn-sylvania State University (PSU) in University Park, PA, USA.
Although tech companies have boosted their reliance on renew-able sources to provide power for data centers, in the last year or so they have been looking to natural gas [
7]. The three biggest man-ufacturers of gas turbines—Siemens Energy (Munich, Germany), Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (Tokyo, Japan), and GE Vernova (Cam-bridge, MA, USA)—have said they will accelerate production [
7,
8]. Even so, "turning this [shortage] around in a one-year or two-year time-frame will be a significant challenge," said Lynch.
The backlog has already led to a dramatic rise in gas turbine prices, which are up 75% for plants that will go online in 2030 or 2031 [
9]. As a result, estimates suggest that the cost of a new gas-fired plant has more than tripled, rising from 800 USD∙kW-1 in 2021 to 2600-2800 USD∙kW-1 today [
10]. If the backlog continues, it could have a variety of effects on tech companies’ plans for powering data centers, national energy strategies, and the climate [
10]. Gas turbine manufacturers will have a big impact on how the turbine shortage plays out. They can eventually cut the backlog if they choose to, said Noble. Whether they will depends on whether the demand for gas turbines holds up. "The question to answer is, ‘Do we see data center buildout continue?’"
Between 2005 and 2020, US power use increased by an average of about 0.1% per year, but it has started climbing rapidly, growing by 2% in 2024 alone [
11]. Data centers still use a relatively small share of US power, but their consumption more than doubled between 2018 and 2023 [
7]. How much of this increase results from AI is hard to pin down, however [
12]. Google’s energy con-sumption grew by more than 100% between 2019 and 2023, for instance, but the company has said that its suppliers, not AI train-ing, were responsible for much of the rise [
13]. A 2025 study from the researcher who created Digiconomist, a project that has tracked the electricity use of cryptocurrencies since 2014, esti-mates that up to 20% of data center electricity consumption now stems from AI [
12]. Data centers still perform many functions that do not depend on AI, including storing data, hosting websites, and running certain applications [
14], and they use the remainder of the power.
To meet the growing need for electricity, tech companies have signed deals to restart shuttered nuclear reactors [
4], given data centers their own power plants [
15], and resorted to portable— and polluting—generators [
16]. "If you have the capability to make power for a data center, you are guaranteed an income right now," said Reid Berdanier, an associate professor of mechanical engineer-ing at PSU. Data center power needs are also leading to a gas plant building boom. For example, the 37 000 m2 data center Meta plans to build in northern Louisiana will run on more than 2 GW pro-vided by three natural gas turbines [
17]. And OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, will use gas turbines to supply 900 MW of power for its new AI data center in West Texas [
18].
As recently as 2023, however, industry executives pronounced the market for gas turbines "dead" [
19]. They did not anticipate the explosion in demand, said Noble. "There is being prepared and then there are disruptive changes—the influx of data centers is more of a disruptive change."
Still, power companies have been able to increase production at their existing plants. In 2024, GE Vernova completed turbines with a total of 20 GW of generating capability, more than twice as much as the year before [
19]. Manufacturers are upgrading their factories to increase output even more. GE Vernova is remodeling its gas turbine factory in South Carolina and expects production to rise by 35% [
7]. Mitsubishi Power says it will double production across its plants [
20].
However, "it is not so easy to build turbines faster," said Berdanier. These devices work by burning fuel, producing hot gases that turn the blades of a turbine, which in turn spins the shaft of a generator to produce electricity [
10,
21]. The gas turbines in power plants operate similarly to jet engines, and certain small gas turbines share their cores with their aeronautical counterparts. GE Vernova’s 37 MW LM2500 model, for instance, is based on the GE CF6-6 aircraft engine. That overlap, Berdanier said, means that utilities and other potential buyers of turbines must compete with the aircraft industry for manufacturing output. Moreover, he added, the availability of certain components, such as cast turbine blades that must resist temperatures of more than 1000 °C, is limited.
So far, gas turbine manufacturers have said that they will squeeze increased production from existing plants, but none has committed to building new plants to meet the demand [
10]. They may decide against that option, said Lynch. "These companies are thinking in terms of decades-long time scales" and must consider whether the current surge in power use "could be a flash in the pan," he said. They have been burned before, he said. Orders for gas turbines also increased rapidly in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as utilities replaced coal-burning power plants [
19]. Then the market plunged when gas prices rose—between 2001 and 2003, the value of the turbine market declined by 75% [
22].
The impacts of the gas turbine backlog remain unclear. The United States already boasts more than 5000 data centers [
23], and construction of the facilities is booming—Meta spent 70 billion USD on new data centers in 2025 alone [
24]. Many of the data cen-ters that are planned or under construction are designed to run on gas. Outside the United States, countries such as Vietnam are look-ing to replace coal-fired facilities with new gas-fueled plants in order to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions [
10]. Natural gas can offer climate benefits because burning it produces half as much CO
2 as burning coal, although the release of methane from gas pro-duction, transportation, and processing partially offsets the gains [
10,
25]. The turbine backlog could upset these plans. If countries cannot acquire the turbines they need, they may stick with coal plants [
10]. And companies facing 5-year or 7-year waits for tur-bines could shelve or pare back their plans for data centers.
By increasing the costs of natural gas-fired plants, the turbine backlog could give wind and solar a boost, making renewables combined with battery storage more competitive [
10,
26]. Turbine buyers may also turn to stopgaps, Noble said. Utilities could opt for smaller turbines with shorter wait times, he said. They could put off replacing aging turbines. His institute is researching how to stretch the lifetimes of gas turbines so that existing plants can operate safely for longer periods of time [
27]. The devices are typ-ically designed to work for around 25 to 30 years [
28], but increas-ing their longevity would reduce the need for new turbines—and perhaps help ameliorate the manufacturing backlog. But Noble said he expects that if the power needs continue to rise, gas turbine manufacturers will eventually catch up to demand. "It will not be an overnight resolution—it will take time."
PDF
(768KB)
