US data centers consumed approximately 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2026, equal to 4.4 percent of total US electrical consumption, according to tracking data from the Electric Choice data center map and International Energy Agency estimates. More than 4,500 active data center facilities operate in the United States, with over 700 additional facilities under active construction across 38 states as of the first half of 2026.
The IEA projects global data center electricity demand will more than double between 2022 and 2026, driven by the rapid deployment of AI computing infrastructure. US data center demand for IT equipment, cooling, lighting, and auxiliary systems is forecast to reach 75.8 gigawatts in 2026, a figure that would have ranked as a mid-size national grid in earlier decades.
Data centers represent a rapidly growing share of total US grid load. S&P Global projects data center grid-power demand will rise 22 percent in 2025 and nearly triple relative to 2022 levels by 2030, as AI training and inference workloads require exponentially more computing and therefore more electricity than previous generations of cloud workloads.
The South and Midwest combined account for approximately 75 percent of all planned US data center construction, with the South alone responsible for 48 percent. Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Tennessee are among the states seeing the fastest growth in data center capacity additions, creating significant new demands on regional transmission and generation infrastructure.
Source: IEA -- https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres