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Data centers are using more electricity than anyone predicted. What happens next?

Data center construction ended two decades of flat U.S. electricity consumption. Utilities can't build the plants to serve them fast enough

Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

For almost two decades, total U.S. electricity demand barely grew. The country kept adding people and businesses that needed power, but Americans were using electricity more efficiently, and the savings canceled out all that growth. Data centers broke the pattern. A single large facility can draw as much electricity as a small city, and the industry has been building them so fast that utilities are now planning for far more power than they expected.

Data centers consumed about 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, enough to power roughly 17 million homes, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Five years earlier, data centers ate up less than half that amount. The Electric Power Research Institute projects that data centers could account for 9% to 17% of all U.S. electricity by 2030, more than doubling their current share even in the most conservative scenario.

Every year, the projections get larger. In 2023, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation projected that the country would need 80 additional gigawatts of electricity over the next decade. One year later, it revised the figure to 132 gigawatts, a 65% increase. New power plants take years to permit and build, and in the states where data center construction is furthest along, utilities can't build fast enough to keep up.

A projected doubling of data center electricity by 2030

Globally, data center electricity consumption has grown at about 12% per year since 2019, reaching an estimated 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, nearly as much electricity as France uses in a year, according to the International Energy Agency. The IEA expects consumption to roughly double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, growing four........

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