One of the early winners of the 2026 artificial intelligence (AI) trade has been energy stocks. It also recently offered some bullish news through its subsidiary, Entergy Louisiana, which landed a deal with http://www.semmms.info/works-a6-hazel-grove-7th-24th-march/ Meta Platforms (META +0.54%). Pearce employs more than 4,000 people across North America and India, including field technicians distributed throughout the U.S. and Canada, along with centralized teams of design engineers and quality assurance specialists. That workforce profile matters in a market where labor availability and technical execution increasingly determine delivery timelines.
Enact policies to encourage energy efficiency, demand response and clean energy procurement
We help you gain critical insights and make more informed decisions across your business priorities. According to the Electric Power Research Institute, a typical ChatGPT query consumes approximately 2.9 watt-hours, while a traditional Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours. This means an AI query uses roughly 10 times as much electricity as a standard web search. Energy demand in the U.S. grew 2% in 2025, according to a report on the global state of energy published Monday by watchdog the International Energy Agency (IEA). The remaining 5-10% goes to lighting, security systems, fire suppression, and other facility infrastructure. While seemingly small, optimizing these systems can yield meaningful efficiency gains in large facilities.
- The Center has studied Americans’ attitudes toward and engagement with artificial intelligence, as well as their views on energy issues, for more than a decade.
- These digital colleagues will continuously monitor, classify, and secure data wherever it resides, ensuring governance becomes an always-on function embedded into daily operations.
- Other key drivers, such as industry output growth and electrification, the deployment of electric vehicles, and the adoption of air conditioning, lead the way.
- According to the International Energy Agency, natural gas accounts for 26% of data center electricity demand.
- The commission made other changes to strengthen protections for customers, like expanding which data centers are covered by its ruling, and requiring longer contracts.
Data Center Energy Consumption Statistics & Data (
In Asia, markets like China, India, and Southeast Asia are also expanding their digital infrastructure; by some estimates, global data center energy use is rising ~12–16% annually in the mid-2020s, far above the growth rate of most other sectors. The consensus is that without dramatic efficiency improvements, data centers and digital networks will become an ever-larger piece of the energy puzzle. This unprecedented growth sets the stage for both challenges and opportunities in the energy sector. Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier, where he leads editorial strategy and coverage focused on the infrastructure powering cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the digital economy. A veteran B2B technology journalist with more than two decades of experience, Vincent specializes in the intersection of data centers, power, cooling, and emerging AI-era infrastructure.
Total U.S. Water Consumption
These figures illustrate why power availability has become the primary constraint in AI-focused data center development, with some analysts predicting that 40% of AI data centers will be operationally limited by power supply by 2027. The nature of data centre demand is expected to evolve over the coming decade, with 5G, the Internet of Things and the metaverse likely to increase demand for low-latency computing, increasing demand for edge data centres. User devices such as smartphones – increasingly equipped with ML accelerators – are set to increase the use of ML with uncertain effects on overall energy demand.
A major driver is artificial intelligence workloads, which require energy-intensive chips; AI-related computing alone is projected to quadruple its electricity use by 2030. By the end of this decade, data centers could be consuming as much power annually as a major industrialized country (on par with Japan). In terms of peak power, analysts estimate the global data center fleet currently draws on the order of 50–60 GW on average, and this may rise to ~130 GW by 2028 (a 16% compound annual growth rate). Such growth would elevate data centers from about 1–2% to roughly 3–4% of world electricity use in the next 5–10 years, absent drastic efficiency or offsetting measures. Europe’s grid operators, after decades of flat or declining demand, now report a surge of new load requests “mostly driven by data centres,” marking a return to load growth.
As AI adoption accelerates, the race to build and supply power infrastructure may become one of the most important. This makes it a direct beneficiary of rising capital expenditures across global power networks. Beyond municipal systems, experts say large industrial withdrawals of water also could affect groundwater and agriculture. Helena Volzer, senior source water policy manager at the Alliance for the Great Lakes, said major water withdrawals can compete with farm irrigation, lower aquifer levels and strain groundwater systems.
Data Centers
Further the water impact may occur hundreds of miles away, in another watershed or even another state, rather than at the data center itself, Ferreira said. For example, much of the electricity powering Virginia’s data centers – the largest hub in the world – is imported from Maryland or Pennsylvania. The reason is that proposed data centers in the Great Lakes region tap into local water utilities, which makes them customers and not permit holders, said Melissa Scanlan, director of the Center for Water Policy. Because of that, there is no legal process to notify the public about a user with a potentially very large water demand. By 2030, the agency estimates data center electricity consumption will more than double to nearly 945 terawatt-hours — slightly more than what Japan consumes annually. In January, Microsoft outlined a five-point plan, including a pledge to cover any additional electricity costs resulting from its data centers, among other community investments.
Can data centers be green?
Where incremental generation or transmission upgrades are required, interconnection timelines can extend to 24, 36, or even 48 months and beyond. For now, inference remains tethered largely to large-scale facilities, but the next phase of AI commercialization may test the boundaries between core and edge deployment models. This dynamic is reinforcing a shift toward greenfield development, where power strategies can be engineered from the outset rather than retrofitted into legacy campuses. Neocloud providers, GPU-as-a-service platforms and AI startups, many backed by aggressive capital deployment strategies, are actively competing for full-building and campus-scale capacity. Under the agreement with the state, the plants will have more time to meet new water pollution standards to comply with the new federal rules, or face fines of $150 to $1,500 a day.
Bars data center operators from earning emissions credits under the state’s cap and invest emissions trading program. Directs the Public Service Commission to condition permits for large load customers on paying for infrastructure improvements needed to interconnect and requiring that a data center be beneficial for ratepayers statewide. That has not happened and is unlikely to happen in the coming years due to tight supply and demand. «It is an extremely large component of the affordability crisis we’re experiencing right now,» Silverman said of data center impact on capacity prices.
- Google and Microsoft have announced 2030 targets, and Iron Mountain a 2040 target, to source and match zero-carbon electricity on a 24/7 basis within each grid where demand is located.
- A majority of those companies, which serve 250 million U.S. customers, cited data centers as a top driver of capital expenditures in their earnings reports.
- If that power is coming from fossil fuel or nuclear power, it can have a much larger water footprint.
- But a typical AI-focused hyperscaler annually consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households.
- The report estimates that data center load growth has tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or triple by 2028.
Cost Per Rack Analysis
Just outside of Washington D.C., historically residential tracts of land are quickly being rezoned as industrial to make room for data centers, drawing the ire of local citizens. Because it is cheaper for companies to build data centers in places with robust power sources and existing infrastructure, many of them cluster together. But the tech industry’s hard pivot into AI has even more dramatically escalated their construction and usage. That’s because it is extremely energy intensive to train AI models, which burn through power at a far higher rate than traditional data center activities. A ChatGPT query, for example, uses ten times more energy than a standard Google query, says David Porter, a vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute.
Globally, data centers (excluding cryptocurrency mining) used an estimated 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024, about 1.5% of world electricity demand. This global demand has roughly doubled since 2010 (when usage was ~194 TWh) thanks to the explosion of digital services. Efficiency gains (better hardware, cooling, and power usage effectiveness) moderated growth for much of the 2010s, but the acceleration of cloud computing and AI has pushed energy use sharply upward in recent years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported in 2025 that worldwide data center electricity demand is on track to more than double by 2030, reaching around 945 TWh (slightly above Japan’s current consumption). Indeed, one analysis forecasts a 165% increase in global data center power demand from 2023 to 2030.
This article was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by ETF.com staff. For investors looking beyond semiconductors, a growing group of ETFs offers exposure to the companies enabling this transformation. To date, conventional wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove PFAS, which would allow the forever chemicals to reach rivers, lakes and drinking water supplies. Backus, sustainability director at Vantage, told the Journal Sentinel it is committed to being water positive in Wisconsin, meaning it will protect more freshwater than it consumes each year. Backus told the Journal Sentinel it is working with We Energies to bring more wind and solar, which use minimal water, online. A new transmission line is needed to power Vantage Data Centers’ project in Port Washington, and one of the two proposed routes would cut an entirely new path.
