Global electricity use by data centers is on course to more than double within the decade, according to the International Energy Agency Energy and AI analysis. Data centres consumed about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, roughly 1.5 percent of the world electricity, and that figure is projected to climb to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, just under 3 percent of global consumption.

The growth rate stands out. Data centre electricity use is expected to expand by about 15 percent per year from 2024 to 2030, more than four times faster than the growth of electricity demand from all other sectors combined. The consumption had already been rising about 12 percent annually since 2017.

Artificial intelligence is the most important driver of the increase, alongside steady growth in other digital services. Electricity use from AI-focused data centers grows much faster than the overall data center total, roughly tripling between 2025 and 2030 as compute-intensive model training and inference scale up.

Looking further out, the agency base case sees global data centre electricity consumption reaching about 1,200 terawatt-hours by 2035. The United States, which hosts a large share of global compute capacity, accounts for a significant portion of this demand growth, placing sustained pressure on domestic generation and transmission planning over the coming years.

Source: International Energy Agency - https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai