Berkeley Lab projects that by 2028 US data centres will draw between 6.7% and 12% of all US electricity
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy lab, published a report in 2024 on US data center energy use. The report estimates that data centers consumed 4.4% of total US electricity in 2023. It projects this consumption to rise to between 6.7% and 12% of total US electricity by 2028, depending on the growth of the rest of the economy.
Verified 2026-08-01
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Data centres may soon use a much larger share of US electricity, putting pressure on 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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