07Energy About 3 minutes
How much power do data centers use?
AI models run in data centers, and data centers draw from the grid. Start with a guess, then see the latest national laboratory estimate for 2024, its projections to 2030, and how the totals compare with your state.
- Make a guess
- See the estimate
- Bring it home
1 Your guess
What share of all U.S. electricity did data centers use in 2024?
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2 The answer
Data: Berkeley Lab, United States Data Center Energy Usage Report: 2025 Update (June 2026); 2024 is its last historical year. Includes all data centers, not only AI; excludes cryptocurrency mining. How these are measured
U.S. data center electricity use, terawatt hours per year
Solid point: modeled estimate for 2024. Dashed line and open points: Reference Case projections for 2028 and 2030; the band is the combined uncertainty range for 2030. Grey: the laboratory's December 2024 Report (historical estimates for 2014 to 2023 and its 2028 range), since revised; the 2025 Update revised earlier years slightly downward. One terawatt hour is one billion kilowatt hours.
Global context International Energy Agency, world data centers
A separate model with different definitions (April 2025). Do not compare it directly with the U.S. figures above.
3 Bring it home
Retail electricity sales in your state, terawatt hours
Measured retail sales from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, shown for scale. State-level data center consumption is not published in these sources, and commercial sales include far more than data centers.
How the cost of intelligence connects to energy, land and capital is traced in Intelligence Capitalism by Bharat Rao.
Sources and method
- Default source. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, United States Data Center Energy Usage Report: 2025 Update, LBNL-2001758, June 2026, escholarship.org/uc/item/33m6w3x0 (DOI 10.71468/P1RP4F). Licensed CC BY 4.0. Figures from pages 7, 8, 9, 10 and 24 of the report (PDF pages 11 to 14 and 28). The 2024 figure is a modeled estimate; 2028 and 2030 figures are Reference Case projections, and the 2030 range combines the report's uncertainty scenarios. The 2030 share uses the report's denominator, forecast U.S. electricity use from the 2025 NERC Long-Term Reliability Assessment.
- Superseded, dated comparison. Arman Shehabi, Sarah J. Smith, Alex Hubbard, Alex Newkirk, Nuoa Lei, Md Abu Bakar Siddik, Billie Holecek, Jonathan Koomey, Eric Masanet and Dale Sartor, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, LBNL-2001637, December 2024, escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1. Figures from the executive summary (PDF pages 7 and 8) and section 4 (PDF page 38). Replaced as the default on September 27, 2026 by the 2025 Update.
- International Energy Agency, Energy and AI, April 2025, iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai. Licensed CC BY 4.0. Used for world totals only (PDF pages 14 and 63).
- U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861 historical data, retail sales by state and sector, 2010 to 2024 (file HS861 2010-.xlsx), eia.gov/electricity/data/state. Public domain.
Method. Every report figure on this page is quoted from the report text; the processing script checks each quoted sentence against the PDF before publishing. Modeled historical estimates, projections and measured statistics are labeled separately. Data center electricity includes all data centers, of which AI servers are one part. U.S. shares are never combined with International Energy Agency global projections. State values are measured retail sales to all customers and to commercial customers (2024 data), converted from megawatt hours to terawatt hours, and are context only. Change log: September 27, 2026, default source changed from the December 2024 Report (2023: 176 TWh, 4.4 percent; 2028 range 325 to 580 TWh) to the June 2026 Update (2024: 192 TWh, 4.7 percent); the guess question changed from 2023 to 2024.