CONCEPT
Data Center Energy Consumption
The aggregate electricity demand of facilities housing computational infrastructure—rising from ~460 TWh globally in 2022 to projected >1,000 TWh by 2026, driven primarily by AI workloads.
Data center energy consumption quantifies the total electrical demand of the physical facilities that house servers, storage, networking equipment, and cooling systems supporting digital services. Global data centers consumed approximately 460 terawatt-hours in 2022—roughly 2% of worldwide electricity demand, comparable to France's total consumption. The International Energy Agency projects this will exceed 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026, driven primarily by artificial intelligence training and inference workloads whose computational intensity far exceeds traditional web services, databases, or enterprise applications. In the United States, data center electricity rose from 1.9% of national demand in 2018 to 4.4% by 2025, exceeding 10% in six states and 25% in Virginia, home to the world's densest data center concentration. This growth occurs against the backdrop of grid decarbonization goals, creating competition for clean energy between AI expansion and climate commitments.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Data center energy consumption divides into computational load (servers performing useful work) and overhead (cooling, power conversion, lighting, physical security). The power usage