Electricity demand from data centers jumped 17 percent in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, far outpacing the roughly 3 percent growth rate for global electricity demand overall. The surge was driven in large part by facilities built specifically for artificial intelligence workloads, which expanded even faster than the data center sector as a whole.

Behind that growth is a wave of capital spending from the largest technology companies. Five major firms increased combined capital expenditure to more than 400 billion dollars in 2025, and the IEA projects that figure will climb by another 75 percent in 2026 as companies race to add computing capacity. The agency expects overall data center electricity consumption to double by 2030, with AI specific facilities on pace to triple their power use over the same period.

To secure reliable electricity for that growth, data center operators are increasingly turning to nuclear power. Conditional power purchase agreements between data center developers and small modular reactor projects grew from 25 gigawatts at the end of 2024 to 45 gigawatts by the time the IEA published its report in April 2026, reflecting a bet on next generation nuclear technology that has yet to reach commercial scale in most markets.

Renewable energy purchasing has also become a defining feature of the industry. Technology companies accounted for roughly 40 percent of all corporate renewable power purchase agreements signed in 2025, underscoring how closely data center growth and clean energy procurement have become linked as operators work to secure enough power to keep pace with demand.

Source: International Energy Agency -- https://www.iea.org/news/data-centre-electricity-use-surged-in-2025-even-with-tightening-bottlenecks-driving-a-scramble-for-solutions