Project Finance as a Tool for Mobilizing Private Capital Into United States Power Infrastructure for Artificial Intelligence Data Centers

Artificial intelligence is changing the scale, speed, and location of electricity demand in the United States.Large data centers can seek hundreds of megawatts, require high reliability, and arrive faster than conventional utility planning and construction cycles.This review examines whether project finance can mobilize the private capital required for generation, energy storage, transmission, and interconnection assets that serve this emerging load.It synthesizes scholarship on project finance, infrastructure contracts, renewable-energy investment, cost of capital, power-purchase agreements, electricity-market design, transmission expansion, and data-center energy use, supplemented by authoritative U.S. institutional evidence.The literature shows that project finance creates value chiefly through risk isolation, contractual coordination, lender monitoring, and matching long-lived assets with longdated capital.For AI-related power infrastructure, creditworthy corporate offtakers can strengthen revenue certainty and permit nonrecourse debt, but conventional contracts must be adapted to uncertain load ramps, short data-center development timelines, interconnection delays, and the possibility that computing efficiency or geographic migration changes demand.