Global data-center electricity demand is expanding at a remarkable pace, and no country is driving that growth more than the United States, according to the Energy Institute's 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy. For the first time in the Statistical Review's 75-year history, the report includes global data-center electricity consumption, drawing on data from S&P Global Energy.

Data-Center Electricity Demand Has Nearly Doubled in Five Years

Worldwide data-center electricity demand reached 787.8 terawatt-hours in 2025, up from 658.2 TWh in 2024 — an extraordinary increase of nearly 20% in a single year. Measured against 2020, when global demand stood at 410.8 TWh, the scale of the expansion is even more striking: data-center electricity use has grown about 92% in just five years, an average annual growth rate of nearly 14%.

For perspective, if the world's data centers were treated as a single country, their electricity consumption would rank among the world's largest power markets. Data centers are no longer a niche load being absorbed around the edges of existing power systems; they have become a major new source of demand that utilities, grid operators, regulators, and power producers must plan around.

The growth is also highly concentrated geographically. The United States and China dominate global data-center electricity use, with Europe a distant third. That distribution matters: adding a large amount of electricity demand to a mature grid that has experienced little growth for decades creates a very different challenge from adding it to an economy where power generation and transmission are already expanding rapidly.

The U.S. Accounts for Nearly 40% of the Global Total

U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 312.6 TWh of electricity in 2025, representing 39.7% of the global total. China ranked second at 205.7 TWh, or 26.1%, while Europe accounted for 144.6 TWh, or 18.4%. Other parts of the Asia-Pacific region consumed another 63.2 TWh, with the remaining demand spread across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the rest of North America. Together, the United States and China accounted for nearly two-thirds of all data-center electricity consumption worldwide.

The U.S. share of last year's growth is even more remarkable. U.S. consumption rose from 249.0 TWh in 2024 to 312.6 TWh in 2025, a gain of 63.5 TWh. With worldwide data-center demand up by about 129.6 TWh, the United States alone accounted for roughly 49% of the global increase.

U.S. data-center electricity consumption has climbed about 81% since 2020, and the 25.5% increase recorded in 2025 marks a significant acceleration. That helps explain why the discussion around artificial intelligence has rapidly become an energy discussion: from a utility's perspective, an AI data center is first and foremost an enormous electrical load that must be served reliably every hour of the day.

America's Long Era of Flat Electricity Demand Is Ending

This new load is arriving after a long period in which U.S. electricity demand barely changed. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that electricity demand grew by just 0.1% annually between 2005 and 2019. Since 2020, however, demand has increased at an average annual rate of about 1.7%, and the EIA specifically identifies electricity use by data centers as a major driver of the change.

Virginia offers perhaps the clearest illustration of what this can mean for an individual power market. Commercial electricity sales in the state increased by nearly 30 million megawatt-hours between 2019 and 2025, with the EIA attributing much of that rise to Virginia's enormous concentration of data centers. In the Dominion portion of the PJM grid, summer peak demand in 2025 was 23% higher than in 2019, while the 2025–26 winter peak was 45% higher than six years earlier. PJM currently expects summer peak demand in that region to grow at an average annual rate of 5.4% over the coming decade, largely because of continued data-center development.

The consequences extend far beyond the generating plant. Electricity must move through transmission lines, transformers, substations, and local distribution equipment before it reaches the servers consuming it. During the first half of 2026, transmission congestion costs across PJM jumped 43% to $6 billion, with Northern Virginia among the areas experiencing significant constraints. Data centers are not solely responsible for those costs, but rapidly rising demand is adding pressure to a grid in which major transmission projects can take years to permit and build.

The Forecasts Are Huge, but Also Uncertain

There is little disagreement that data-center electricity demand will continue to rise, although there is considerable disagreement over exactly how fast. S&P Global Energy estimates that worldwide demand could increase at an annual rate of 12% to 16% between 2025 and 2030. Its power-sector scenario reaches about 1,550 TWh by 2030 — nearly twice the 2025 level and roughly equivalent to the projected electricity consumption of all of Latin America. Under that scenario, data centers would consume about 6% of global electricity.

The range of U.S. forecasts is similarly wide. A Department of Energy-supported analysis estimated that data centers consumed about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could consume between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, depending on the pace of deployment and improvements in computing efficiency.

This is where the AI story begins to collide with physical reality. Generation has to be built to supply these facilities, and so do the transmission lines and substations that deliver the electricity. Natural-gas generation can often be built faster than nuclear power, but turbine supply chains have tightened. Renewable capacity can be added relatively quickly, though intermittency increases the need for storage, firm generation, and transmission. Nuclear plants that once seemed destined for retirement have suddenly become attractive sources of around-the-clock power for technology companies looking for large blocks of reliable electricity.

Energy May Become the Constraint on AI

The technology industry naturally focuses on computing capacity, but the limiting factor in the AI buildout may increasingly lie outside the data center itself. A company can order advanced chips and design an enormous computing campus, but those servers are not very useful without access to hundreds of megawatts of reliable electricity. At the largest proposed campuses, the requirement can reach gigawatt scale, placing an individual data-center complex in the same general category of power demand as a sizable city.

This also means the economic impact of AI is spreading into sectors that have little to do with software. Utilities are revising load forecasts, and power developers are planning new generation. Pipeline companies may benefit from additional natural-gas demand, while manufacturers of turbines, transformers, switchgear, cooling equipment, and electrical components are seeing a new source of orders.

Battery storage and renewable power will have roles to play, as will nuclear plants and existing fossil generation. The AI revolution increasingly requires an all-of-the-above energy response, because the scale and speed of the demand growth leave little room to rely on a single technology.

The Big Picture

For most of the past two decades, the U.S. power sector was built around an assumption of relatively stagnant electricity demand. That assumption is rapidly becoming obsolete. Data centers are not the only reason, but they are emerging as one of the most powerful forces behind the change: in only five years, global data-center electricity consumption has nearly doubled, and in 2025 the United States accounted for almost half of the worldwide increase.

The debate over artificial intelligence usually centers on software, chips, productivity, employment, and whether technology valuations have moved too far ahead of reality. From an energy perspective, however, something very physical is happening underneath that digital revolution.

The United States now consumes nearly 40% of the electricity used by data centers worldwide, and the infrastructure required to support further growth will have to be financed, permitted, manufactured, and built. AI may live in the cloud, but the cloud is increasingly dependent on power plants, pipelines, transmission lines, transformers, cooling systems, and a grid that was never designed for demand to grow this quickly.

By Robert Rapier, OilPrice.com