The IEA reports data-centre electricity demand up about 17% in 2025
The International Energy Agency reported that data-centre electricity demand rose about 17% in 2025 to roughly 485 terawatt-hours, against about 3% growth in global electricity demand overall, with AI-focused facilities growing considerably faster, and projected roughly 950 TWh and about 3% of world electricity by 2030. The binding constraints it identifies are grid connection and equipment supply rather than generation in aggregate — which is why a global percentage understates the difficulty in the particular counties where the facilities are being built.
Observed — measured or witnessed, with the observation cited.
Subjects
- Data-centre electricity demand · physical quantity · not located
- International Energy Agency · organisation · France · not located
- Northern Virginia data-centre corridor · region · United States
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
Energy and AI (World Energy Outlook Special Report), with the IEA's subsequent data-centre demand update
Data centres accounted for about 415 TWh, or roughly 1.5% of world electricity, in 2024, projected by the IEA to more than double to about 945 TWh by 2030; the IEA's subsequent update reports demand rising about 17% in 2025 to roughly 485 TWh against about 3% growth in global electricity demand, with AI-focused data centres growing considerably faster, and projects roughly 950 TWh and about 3% of world electricity by 2030. V55 verification basis: iea.org was not fetched. The 2024 figures and the 945 TWh projection were carried in search results attributing them explicitly to the April 2025 Energy and AI report, and are taken as verified. The 2025 update figures were carried with attribution to IEA news and to Key Questions on Energy and AI, but the publication date of that update was NOT resolved in this run and the AI-specific share of data-centre demand is an estimate in every source retrieved.
International Energy Agency · 2025-04, with a later update · Partly verified
IEA, Energy and AI, April 2025, https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai — executive summary and "Energy demand from AI"; IEA news, "Data centre electricity use surged in 2025, even with tightening bottlenecks driving a scramble for solutions"; IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI
Loudoun County, Virginia — data-centre briefings and the "Data Center Capital of the World" material
Loudoun County, and the Ashburn–Sterling corridor within it, hosts the densest concentration of data-centre capacity in the world by the county's own account, and county material addresses growth constraints arising from electricity supply. V55 verification basis: the county documents were NOT fetched; only their titles and general subject were returned by search. No capacity figure is carried into this pack because retrieved third-party figures for the corridor differ by factors of several — installed IT load, contracted capacity and planned capacity are conflated across sources — and the widely repeated claim that a large share of global internet traffic passes through the county could not be traced to any authoritative source. This record names where a curator should check, not what was checked.
Loudoun County, Virginia (county government publications) · accessed 2026-08 · Partly verified
Loudoun County document archive, "Loudoun County, Virginia: Data Center Capital of the World"; Loudoun County data-centre brief on growth and energy constraints, https://www.loudoun.gov/
Recorded on Data-centre electricity demand
- The IEA publishes its first global analysis of energy and AI
- The IEA reports data-centre electricity demand up about 17% in 2025
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.