Data centres consumed about 4.4% of total US electricity in 2023, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's data centre energy usage report projects that share climbing to between 6.7% and 12% by 2028, with data-centre power demand more than doubling between 2017 and 2023 largely due to the growth in AI servers
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2024 Report on U.S. Data Center Energy Use estimates that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023. This share is projected to increase to between 6.7% and 12% by 2028. The report notes that data-center power demand more than doubled between 2017 and 2023, largely due to the growth in AI servers.
Verified 2026-09-24
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Data centres could take a much bigger slice of US power within a few years, stretching the grid.
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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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