(Bloomberg) -- Two of the world’s biggest data center developers have projects in Nvidia Corp.’s hometown that may sit empty for years because the local utility isn’t ready to supply electricity.

In Santa Clara, California, where the world’s biggest supplier of artificial-intelligence chips is based, Digital Realty Trust Inc. applied in 2019 to build a data center. Roughly six years later, the development remains an empty shell awaiting full energization. Stack Infrastructure, which was acquired earlier this year by Blue Owl Capital Inc., has a nearby 48-megawatt project that’s also vacant, while the city-owned utility, Silicon Valley Power, struggles to upgrade its capacity.

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The fate of the two facilities highlights a major challenge for the US tech sector and indeed the wider economy. While demand for data centers has never been greater, driven by the boom in cloud computing and AI, access to electricity is emerging as the biggest constraint. That's largely because of aging power infrastructure, a slow build-out of new transmission lines and a variety of regulatory and permitting hurdles.

And the pressure on power systems is only going to increase. Electricity requirements from AI computing will likely more than double in the US alone by 2035, based on BloombergNEF projections. Nvidia's Jensen Huang and OpenAI's Sam Altman are among corporate leaders that have predicted trillions of dollars will pour into building new AI infrastructure.

“The demand has never been higher, and it's really a power-supply problem that we have,” Bill Dougherty, executive vice president for data center solutions at real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc., said in an interview.

The Santa Clara projects are relatively small compared with the massive complexes for large-language model AI developers, which are now being built in Texas, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and New Mexico, where the cost of electricity is lower but the power sources are often still works in progress.  The smaller centers serve local cloud clients who pay a higher price for real estate and power to reduce latency caused by long-distance transmissions — think high-frequency traders or autonomous-vehicle operators who need information in microseconds.