US data centres used 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023 — on Berkeley Lab's measurement, 4.4% of the country's total
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy lab, published a report in 2024 on U.S. data center energy use. The report estimates that data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, which accounted for about 4.4% of the total U.S. electricity consumption that year. This usage climbed from 58 TWh in 2014.
Verified 2026-08-01
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Data centres were already a measurable share of US electricity before the latest AI build-out.
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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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