Modular Data Centers will own 2026: AI Demand Is Now. Large Turbines Take Years
- Todd Colpron
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
The AI infrastructure market is entering its most revealing phase. Demand is real, but delivery is being separated from promotion at an accelerating pace. In the last 18 months, “AI data center” has become a label applied to everything from entitled land to partially designed shells—often with bold megawatt claims and thin execution behind them.
That’s the backdrop for what Groq CEO Jonathan Ross has called “fake data centers”: projects that look investable in a deck, but can’t meet the basic requirements of mission-critical compute—power, redundancy, cooling, and operational readiness.
The market is now learning the hard way that the constraint is not branding or square footage. It’s power delivery—specifically when power can actually show up.
The turbine backlog is the real schedule
For developers and operators trying to bring serious capacity online, the uncomfortable truth is this: large gas turbine procurement has moved from lead times measured in quarters to lead times measured in years.
S&P Global Commodity Insights reported that OEMs were quoting upwards of five to seven years if you are trying to order a gas-fired turbine right now, with timing dependent on model and queue position. That long lead time isn’t merely a supply chain nuisance—it breaks the traditional data center development model. If your build plan assumes utility interconnect plus a new large turbine solution within a typical development window, the calendar no longer supports your pro forma.
The OEMs themselves are signaling the same thing through their backlogs. GE Vernova has described an 80-GW gas turbine backlog stretching into 2029, and its CEO has said reservations are on track to be effectively sold out through 2030, a blunt indicator of how tight production slots have become.
When the market’s critical equipment has a multi-year queue, the “we’ll just procure generation” line becomes indistinguishable from speculation. That’s a major reason why investors are increasingly skeptical of developers promising huge power outcomes without evidence of secured capacity. A Groq investor recently warned he’s “deeply concerned” about the speculative nature of parts of the data center market and the “build it and they will come” mentality—exactly the psychology that produces fake data centers.
Why fake data centers proliferate in a power-constrained era
In a normal cycle, optimistic planning can be forgiven because time and equipment availability can absorb errors. In this cycle, time is the scarce asset—and the penalty for being wrong is severe.
The “fake data center” pattern typically shows up in a few predictable ways: projects that announce megawatts before interconnect is secured; facilities designed like generic real estate rather than compute plants; and development stacks that assume equipment and commissioning will occur on a schedule the OEM market no longer supports.
The Financial Times’ reporting on AI power demand underscores the broader issue: the US and global power systems are under strain, and patchwork solutions are unlikely to be sufficient for the data centers coming online in the near term. In other words, if you’re planning for 2026–2027 operations but sourcing power infrastructure on 2030 timelines, your project may be “real” as a property—but not as an AI compute facility.
Modular is winning because it solves the calendar, not just the design
This is where modular data centers shift from “alternative” to “answer.”
Modular data centers take what used to be sequential—site work, build, fit-out, integration, commissioning—and move much of it into controlled manufacturing environments. The point is not aesthetics. The point is predictable delivery.
Data Center Knowledge summarized the advantage well: modular designs address three core concerns—lead time, predictability, and cost—and increase the likelihood that a project finishes at a predetermined quality and cost. That matters in 2026 because predictability is now a competitive edge. If turbines and grid upgrades are stuck in multi-year queues, the winners will be those who can bring standardized, validated capacity online while others are still waiting for equipment slots.
The Modular Building Institute makes the same argument in practical terms: modern modular data center platforms are factory-built, arrive on-site pre-tested, and can be deployed in months, not years, with repeatable quality and scalable capacity. In a market where traditional “stick-built” timelines are colliding with AI urgency, modular’s value proposition becomes less about preference and more about feasibility.
Power strategy is shifting behind-the-meter—and modular fits the shift
Another reason modular is rising quickly is the industry’s growing turn toward behind-the-meter and distributed power strategies to bypass regulatory and interconnection bottlenecks.
A Seeking Alpha analysis notes that modular behind-the-meter power generation solutions are gaining traction among data center developers specifically to sidestep interconnect hurdles, and highlights small gas turbines as a modular technology gaining share due to fast deployment and scalable footprint.
Put simply: the market is reorganizing itself around what can be delivered and commissioned on the right timeline. Modular data centers integrate naturally with that new power architecture—whether air-cooled, liquid-cooled, or immersion-cooled—because they are designed for faster siting, parallelized execution, and phased expansion.
Where Eliakim Capital Fits
This is exactly why Eliakim Capital is leaning into modular capacity for 2026.
Starting 2026 with strong momentum, we are now securing the remaining 2026 production slots for our modular data center solutions. Each deployment can be fully customized, white-labeled, and engineered up to Tier IV specifications to support mission-critical operations. Our platforms are designed to accommodate crypto mining and AI workloads across liquid-cooled, air-cooled, and immersion-cooled configurations.
In a market defined by five to seven year turbine queues and OEM reservation backlogs, the practical question is no longer “who has the best deck?” It’s “who has secured production capacity, integration capability, and a deployment path that clears 2026 realities?”
Eliakim’s approach is built around that full-stack mindset: solving for infrastructure execution, not infrastructure narrative. When power timelines and equipment availability dictate outcomes, modular isn’t a trend—it’s the path that aligns with the clock.
The 2026 conclusion: schedule is strategy
The AI buildout will not be limited by demand. It will be limited by what can be energized, cooled, and operated reliably—on time.
As turbine lead times stretch into the latter half of the decade and OEM reservation books fill, the market will continue to punish speculative “fake data centers” that promise megawatts without a deliverable path. The projects that win in 2026 will be the ones that industrialize delivery: modularized, validated, deployable capacity tied to real supply chain access—not hope.
If you want AI-ready capacity in 2026, the argument is simple: you can’t wait five to seven years for the backbone of your power plan. You need an execution model designed for the bottleneck. Modular is that model.
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