A car passes in front of a Digital Reality Data Center building in Ashburn, Virginie, United States, March 17, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
The Sovereign Heritage Fund ADQ and the American investment capital Energy Capital Partners, or ECP, signed an agreement for an investment partnership of $ 25 billion dedicated to the increase in electricity production, mainly in the United States, to meet the needs of the data center, companies announced on Wednesday.
The partnership “aims to meet the growing power needs of data centers, hyperscal cloud companies and other energy -intensive industries”, a joint declaration of the companies read. “As the continuity and quality of the power supply are crucial for these high growth industries, the need for captive electric power plants which is nearby is often a prerequisite. The partnership is focused on satisfying these long-term needs.”
The 50-50 partnership will deploy capital with the aim of investing more than $ 25 billion out of 25 project gigawatts via the development of the Greenfield site, new versions and expansions of current infrastructure.
ADQ, created in 2018 in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, focuses on investment in critical infrastructure and global supply chains, while ECP is described as the largest private owner in electricity and renewable energy production in the American ADQ supervised $ 225 billion in 2005.
The announcement of the partnership comes at an era of rapid power needs – the demand for electricity should increase in the United States after having been widely flat for about 15 years, fueled by new data centers, factories, electric vehicles and warmer and longer summers.
And like the technology giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Google argue to take the lead in the artificial intelligence revolution, the data centers necessary to fuel booming technology consume an ever increasing amount of energy.
The American Department of Energy, In a December 2024 report, Considers that the growth of the data center in the United States has tripled in the last decade and that the total electricity consumption of the data center should double or triple by 2028.
According to “a 2024 report by the International Energy Agency on Electricity,“The sector of data centers in the United States” should represent more than a third of additional demand until 2026. “Globally, total electricity consumption of data centers could reach more than 1000 hours of Térawatt, or TWh, in 2026 – which is up compared to 460 TWh in 2022 and” almost equivalent to electricity consumption of Japan “.
The ambitions have water
The agreement comes as president of the ADQ and the national security advisor of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, went to Washington, meeting President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, among other political and commercial leaders.
Water has worked to strengthen links with the United States on AI and seeks better access to American technology in order to build its own infrastructure and to diversify its economy far from hydrocarbons.
The little Gulf Sheikhdom, rich in oil, continued investments in artificial intelligence, data centers and energy transition technologies while the race for the domination of AI brings together the pace.
Water Investment Fund MGX last year teamed up with Microsoft and BlackRock to form a consortium with an initial objective of investing more than $ 30 billion in AI-related projects in the United States on Thursday, the US Tamias manufacturing giant Nvidia And XAI of Musk announced that they would join the project.
