Data-centre electricity demand

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The electricity drawn by data centres, which is where the compute trend becomes a physical claim on a shared system. The International Energy Agency's Energy and AI report of April 2025 put global data-centre consumption at about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, roughly 1.5% of world electricity, and projected it to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030. The IEA's subsequent update reports that demand rose about 17% in 2025 to roughly 485 TWh — against about 3% growth in global electricity demand overall — with AI-focused facilities growing far faster, and projects roughly 950 TWh and about 3% of world electricity by 2030. Two cautions belong with those numbers. Data centres are not only AI, and the AI share is estimated rather than metered. And the constraint that actually bites is local and temporal rather than global: a grid connection in one county, at one time of day, is what determines whether a facility can be built, which is why the global percentage is a poor guide to where the difficulty is.

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