How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use? | Our World in Data
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Few — if any — technologies have been adopted as quickly as artificial intelligence (AI). Since that computation runs on electricity, discussions around AI often return to what this means for energy demand.<br>These concerns tend to take three forms. One is environmental: growing energy demand for artificial intelligence will drive increases in carbon emissions, and make it harder to decarbonize. Another is the impact on local communities: high electricity demand could strain local supplies and push up energy prices. The third is that AI’s energy consumption could be the technology’s bottleneck; for those who want to see it expand, this could be a key limiting factor.<br>How much energy, then, does AI consume?<br>We can look at this question on two levels. The first is the total amount of electricity AI uses. The second is about individual impact, or how much electricity each query consumes.<br>In this article, I try to answer both of these questions.<br>Before digging into the data, it’s worth clarifying what is included in AI energy consumption. It’s the electricity consumed for both training and running the models (called “inference”). Tech companies rarely publish data on how much energy is consumed when training their models, but based on the estimates we do have, it’s likely that energy demand is dominated by inference, not training.1<br>The estimates we’ll look at include the electricity used specifically for the servers, plus additional energy used for cooling, lighting, and other things needed to keep the data centers running. They don’t include the energy used to power the device — a laptop, desktop, or phone — that someone is using to access AI. Importantly — and this matters when comparing to other sources — they do not include demand from cryptocurrency mining.<br>How much of the world’s electricity is used for data centers and artificial intelligence?<br>Let’s start with the big picture. How much electricity did data centers consume last year?<br>According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), around 485 terawatt-hours (TWh).2 That’s equivalent to the annual electricity generation of Germany. And for context, that’s around 1.5% of the world’s electricity generation .3<br>Another source, the Energy Institute, estimates that data center power demand — including crypto mining — was around 790 TWh in 2025 (or 2.5% of global electricity generation). See below for more on why they differ.Now, data centers are more than just AI: they’re facilities that contain the servers and IT infrastructure behind all of our digital services. That’s everything from email and Internet browsing to Netflix streaming, Google Maps, online banking, and messaging friends.<br>AI data centers are dedicated facilities for running AI models. The distinction between the two is not always clean-cut, but the chart below shows an estimated breakdown.<br>Non-AI data centers consumed two-thirds of the total, and AI-focused ones, the remaining third. Based on this data from the International Energy Agency, I estimate that AI consumed around 0.5% of the world’s electricity in 2025.4<br>Electricity currently accounts for around one-fifth of the world’s primary energy consumption.5 Hence, AI likely consumed 0.1% to 0.2% of total primary energy in 2025.<br>Download
Given how quickly demand for AI has been increasing, it might be surprising that AI-focused data centers consume less, on aggregate, than non-AI ones. Projections expect this gap to close quickly. In the chart, I’ve also included the IEA’s base-case projection of data center demand in 2030.<br>These projections are highly uncertain, and some have argued that the IEA is among the most conservative in its assessment of AI demand growth. Even so, most of the growth in data center demand will come from AI-focused facilities. In this scenario, data centers grow to 3% of global electricity in 2030, and AI centers then use about the same amount as non-AI ones.<br>Additional informationHow do estimates of data center electricity demand vary by source?Above, we looked at estimates of global electricity demand for data centers from the International Energy Agency, one of the most widely used sources on energy data.<br>However, other sources also publish estimates of data center demand. Another of these comes from S&P Global, which is used and reported by the Energy Institute. Its latest Statistical Review of World Energy included estimates of data center demand for the first time.<br>How do they compare?<br>In the chart below, I’ve shown both sources from 2020 to 2025. This means we’re comparing historical estimates only, not projections, where differences between sources are far larger.<br>As you can see, there are large differences between them. S&P’s figures for 2025 are around 60% higher, but have been consistently higher for the entire time series.<br>Neither organization provides detailed and transparent breakdowns of...