Australia’s data center electricity use projected to rise sevenfold in a decade

Australia’s data centers currently sip about 5 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, a modest 3% of the National Electricity Market. By 2035-36, that number is expected to hit 34 TWh, roughly a sevenfold increase that would push data centers to 13% of total national consumption. To put that in perspective, the entire NEM is projected to grow about 40% over the same period, reaching around 250 TWh. Data centers alone would account for a disproportionate chunk of that growth. The numbers behind the surge The Australian Energy Market Operator, the body responsible for managing the country’s electricity and gas systems, recently doubled its count of data centers in development from 97 to 225. AEMO’s earlier models had anticipated data center demand reaching roughly 12 TWh by 2030. Those projections have been revised sharply upward, driven largely by the accelerating computational appetite of artificial intelligence workloads. Capacity forecasts from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation paint a similar picture. CEFC projects that data center capacity will grow from 1.35 GW today to somewhere between 4.7 and 7.4 GW by 2035. The geographic hotspots for this buildout are concentrated aro...