Company: HVIIR
Filing Date: 2025-12-23
Form Type: S-4
Source: 0001493152-25-029121
Chunk: 341

Company: Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. VII
Filing Date: 2025-12-23
Form: S-4
Chunk 341
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-scale, long-duration, firm power, particularly in regions where data centers and industrial loads are scaling far faster than the grid can expand.

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AI, Cloud, and Digital Infrastructure as a Structural Demand Driver

Electricity demand stemming from AI and hyperscale cloud computing represents one of the most significant structural load additions in modern U.S. grid history. McKinsey estimates that data centers electricity consumption will triple between 2022 and 2030, driven in large part by AI clusters that exhibit 30%+ annual growth in compute needs (McKinsey, The Future of Data Centers, 2023). Major utilities, including Dominion, Georgia Power, and TVA, report data centers load growth of 13–18% annually, levels they characterize as unprecedented in the last century of grid planning. Goldman Sachs projects that AI-oriented data centers alone may require an incremental 200 Terawatt (TW)-hours (TWh) per year by 2030, equivalent to adding the electricity consumption of Spain (Goldman Sachs Global Research, 2023).

AI workloads are a primary driver of this acceleration. Currently, AI is responsible for 5-15% of data center power consumption, but this could increase to 35-50% by 2030 according to International Energy Agency (IEA)-commissioned research (CarbonBrief). Training large language models requires substantial power. GPT-4 training consumed approximately 50 GWh of energy (MIT Technology Review) but inference workloads, which run continuously to serve user requests, account for 80% of AI power consumption and are projected to reach 85% by 2028 according to Schneider Electric.

At the same time, data centers are rapidly becoming more efficient by increasing the power density of server racks. This escalation in power density is governed by the Jevons Paradox: as computational efficiency increases, the reduced unit cost of intelligence spurs exponentially greater demand, leading to higher aggregate energy consumption. Historical precedent in the electricity sector confirms this phenomenon; a 65% reduction in the real price of electricity over the last 70 years coincided with a 15-fold expansion in the global electricity market.

The major hyperscalers have responded with historic capital expenditure commitments. Combined 2025 capital spending guidance from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta totals approximately $350 billion, with the majority directed toward AI and data center infrastructure (Fusion Worldwide, 2025). Amazon’s annualized 2025 capital expenditures reached approximately $118 billion, while Google increased guidance