US data center electricity demand is on pace to climb from about 224 terawatt-hours in 2025 to roughly 606 terawatt-hours by 2030, according to data compiled by McKinsey and published by Visual Capitalist. That growth would push data centers' share of total US electricity consumption to about 12 percent by the end of the decade. The increase is being driven largely by the buildout of computing capacity for artificial intelligence, along with continued growth in cloud storage and everyday digital services.

Utilities across the country are being asked to plan for a pace of demand growth with few precedents in the history of the US grid, with some regions seeing new large-load requests that rival the power needs of entire cities. The scale of the projected increase helps explain why grid operators, state regulators, and utilities have moved to create new interconnection standards specifically aimed at data centers and other large electricity users over the past year.

For utilities in the Southeast, including Georgia Power and other regional providers, the same national trend is showing up locally as new campuses request hundreds of megawatts of capacity at a time, often years before adequate transmission or generation is in place to serve them.

Source: Visual Capitalist - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-the-energy-demand-of-u-s-data-centers-2023-2030p/