Projections indicate US data center electricity use could reach 325 to 580 terawatt-hours by 2028, up sharply from 176 terawatt-hours in 2023, according to a March 2026 compilation of data center energy statistics from Brightlio drawing on federal and industry research.

US data centers consumed about 60 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2014, a figure that stayed flat through 2016 before climbing to 76 terawatt-hours by 2018, equal to 1.9 percent of total US electricity consumption. By 2023, that figure had more than doubled again to 176 terawatt-hours, or 4.4 percent of the nation's total electricity use, and separate 2024 estimates place consumption at approximately 183 terawatt-hours. Under a high-growth scenario, data centers could account for between 6.7 percent and 12 percent of all US electricity demand by 2028.

Artificial intelligence workloads are driving a large share of the increase. Energy use by GPU-accelerated servers jumped from under 2 terawatt-hours in 2017 to more than 40 terawatt-hours in 2023, while conventional server energy use roughly doubled over the same period, from 30 to 60 terawatt-hours. Worldwide, data centers consumed an estimated 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, about 1.5 percent of global demand, with projections showing that figure could reach 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, or roughly 3 percent of total global electricity consumption.

Renewable sources including wind, solar, and hydropower currently supply about 27 percent of the electricity consumed by data centers, a share projected to rise to 50 percent by 2030 as wind and solar capacity expands to meet growing demand from the sector.

Source: Brightlio - https://brightlio.com/data-center-stats/