b'2American Journal ofTransportation ajot.comAI and data center boomPROJECT CARGO 2025drives project cargoThegrowthinDataCenters,fueledbyAIrevo-lution, is driving a massive demand for electric power.Tomeetthisdemandmorebuildingof electric generation capacity is neededand it has already started.By Pete Goldin, AJOT Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving massive growth in data centers, and consequently an increase in project cargo to serve those facilities.Over100megawattsof newdatacenterconstruction have been added every month sincelate2021andtheUS colocationdatacentermarketDanny Yunes, VP, Mission Critical doubled in size in four years,Ops and Strategy, Logistics Plusaccordingto AFCOMs2025 State of the Data Center Report. sitiesthatis,theenergy Emergingtechnologiesconsumption of servers in the especially AIare the driving(BOOMcontinued on forces behind this data centerpage 4)boom.Thevastcomputa-tionalpowerdemandsof AI modeltrainingarespurring the construction of hyperscale datacenterswithhundreds ofmegawattstomorethan agigawattofpowercapac-ity, says the State of Digital InfrastructureIndustry2025 Report from iMasons.Consulting company McK-inseysays,Ourresearch shows that global demand for datacentercapacitycould almosttripleby2030,with about70%ofthatdemand coming from AI workloads. McKinsey analysis also shows that by 2030, companies will investalmost$7trillionin capitalexpendituresondata center infrastructure globally.McKinseyaddsthatthe growthofAI,andthedata centerstohostit,hasmul-tipledrivers:massadoption ofGenAI,apopularnew form of AI that can generate new content based on infor-mation collected across mas-sive datasets; the deployment ofAI-poweredapplications across a variety of industries; hyperscalersandenterprises competingtoobtaintheir ownproprietaryAIcapac-ity; and governments invest-ing in AI infrastructure. The topcloudproviders,called hyperscalers;techindustry giants; colocation specialists; majorcorporations;niche players in AI; crypto compa-nies;andevengovernments areallparticipatinginthe data center boom.The race is on right now to build up as much compute capacity as possible, explains DannyYunes,VP,Mission CriticalOpsandStrategyat LogisticsPlus,a3PLthat handles project cargo for data centerprojects.Companies arebuildingdatacentersfor AI, and they need power.M oreP owere ssentialAI-readydatacenters consumeanespeciallylarge amount of energy because of their high average power den-'