The International Energy Agency projects that global data centre electricity consumption will exceed 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026, a total roughly equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Japan.

The figure represents a steep climb from a recent baseline. Data centre consumption stood at approximately 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, about 1.5 percent of global electricity use. Reaching 1,000 terawatt-hours within two years implies a growth rate with few parallels among established load categories.

United States facilities account for a substantial share. The agency projects domestic data centre electricity demand above 250 terawatt-hours in 2026. Separate U.S. tracking places current data centre consumption at 176 terawatt-hours annually across more than 4,500 active facilities, representing 5.9 percent of national electricity use, with over 700 additional facilities under construction across 38 states.

The acceleration traces primarily to hardware composition. Providers have invested heavily in graphics processing units for artificial intelligence workloads, and those systems draw substantially more power per rack than the general-purpose servers that defined earlier data centre design. The agency estimates the AI segment alone will consume at least ten times its 2023 demand by 2026.

Capacity to connect that load remains constrained. Current estimates put maximum annual new data centre interconnection at roughly 7.1 gigawatts in the United States, below the announced project pipeline.

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