Almost twice the electricity
The IEA's 2026 update estimates that data centres consumed 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. Its central projection reaches around 950 TWh in 2030, equivalent to roughly 3% of global electricity demand in that year.
The increase between the two plotted values is 465 TWh, or about 96%. That is a calculation from the IEA's rounded figures, not an additional forecast.
More than the AI model
These totals cover data centres as facilities. They should not be labelled as AI's electricity consumption alone.
The IEA's earlier Energy and AI report describes the equipment behind that boundary: servers, storage, networking, cooling and other supporting systems. Cooling's share varies considerably between facilities. A total for the building therefore answers a different question from the energy used to run a particular model or query.
A projection with constraints
The 2026 outlook identifies limits in electricity connections, equipment and chip supply. Efficiency improvements and changes in the kind of AI being used also affect demand. The endpoint is a planning scenario, not a promise of what will happen.
That distinction matters when reading the graphic. The first bar is an estimate of a completed year. The second describes a possible future under the IEA's central assumptions. They share a unit, but not the same degree of certainty.
