International Energy Agency projects AI data center power demand to double by 2030

The world’s most authoritative energy forecaster just quantified what the tech industry has been whispering about for two years: AI is about to become one of the biggest electricity consumers on the planet. The International Energy Agency’s April 2025 “Energy and AI” report projects that global data center power consumption will more than double by 2030, climbing from roughly 415 TWh in 2024 to approximately 945 TWh. To put that in perspective, 945 TWh is close to the entire annual electricity consumption of France and Germany combined. And it would represent nearly 3% of all global electricity demand, up from a much smaller slice today. The numbers behind the surge Data center electricity use has been growing at about 12% annually since 2019. The IEA expects that pace to accelerate to roughly 15% per year through the end of the decade, driven almost entirely by AI workloads running on accelerated servers rather than traditional computing tasks. The geographic concentration is striking. The United States and China alone are forecast to account for nearly 80% of the total increase in data center electricity demand. The US is expected to add approximately 240 TWh of data center load ...