The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that servers alone accounted for about 7% of U.S. commercial sector electricity consumption in 2025, a share it projects could grow to between 22% and 33% by 2050 as data-center and AI computing demand expands
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that servers consumed 7% of the electricity used by the U.S. commercial sector in 2025. This projection comes from the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2026 (AEO2026), which provides a long-term outlook on energy trends. The EIA projects this share could rise to between 22% and 33% by 2050 due to expanding data center and AI computing demand.
Verified 2026-09-30
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Servers already use a noticeable share of business electricity, and forecasters expect that share to grow a lot.
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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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