Microsoft faces $80B power backlog amid AI data center demand surge

Microsoft has a GPU problem, and it’s not the kind you’d expect. The company has the chips. It has the customers. What it doesn’t have is enough electricity to plug everything in. An estimated $80 billion in unfulfilled Azure orders are currently bottlenecked by power grid limitations, according to CEO Satya Nadella. That’s not a software bug or a supply chain hiccup. It’s a physics problem, and it’s forcing one of the world’s most valuable companies to watch demand pile up while processors collect dust in warehouses. The numbers behind the backlog Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligations, essentially the total value of contracted but not yet delivered services, hit $678 billion by the end of its fiscal year 2026. That figure represents an 84% year-over-year increase. The bottleneck is straightforward: data centers need enormous amounts of power, and the electrical grid can’t deliver it fast enough. Microsoft added 1 gigawatt of new data center capacity in its most recent quarter alone and opened 31 new data centers in Q4 of its fiscal year. To put 1 GW in perspective, that’s roughly enough electricity to power a mid-sized American city. The company plans to double ...