EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2026 estimates that data-centre servers alone, before any cooling or other building load, already accounted for 7% of all US commercial-sector electricity in 2025
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated this figure in its Annual Energy Outlook 2026 (AEO2026), a long-term outlook that projects electricity consumption. This 7% refers specifically to the electricity used by data center servers and does not include power for cooling or other building loads. The EIA projects this share to grow to 22%-33% of commercial building electricity use by 2050 across its cases.
Verified 2026-08-04
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AI and cloud servers already take a noticeable bite of business electricity, before cooling is even counted.
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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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