EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2026 finds data-centre servers already take a rising share of America's commercial-building power draw, and projects that share will grow, across its scenarios, to somewhere between 22% and 33% of all US commercial-building electricity use by 2050
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that electricity consumed by data center servers will increase across the commercial building stock. The Annual Energy Outlook 2026 (AEO2026) projects that server consumption alone will reach between 446 billion kilowatthours (BkWh) and 818 BkWh by 2050. This represents 22%-33% of commercial building electricity use by 2050 across EIA's cases.
Verified 2026-09-26
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Data centres could become one of the biggest users of power in America's commercial buildings.
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- American Electric Power, one of the largest US utilities, which counts hyperscalers and manufacturers among its new large customers, signed fresh load commitments in the third quarter of 2026 and now expects its contracted extra load to reach 84 GW by 2031 AEP signed 15 GW of new load commitments in a single quarter
- AI data centres worldwide reached a power capacity comparable to New York State at peak demand in 2025, which Stanford's AI Index puts at 29.6 gigawatts
- OpenAI does not disclose GPT-4o's resource footprint, so Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report turned to independent researchers' estimates of the water needed to cool the servers behind it — as much as 1.58 million kilolitres a year — more than 1.2 million people drink annually
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