U.S. Data Centers Consumed 39.7% of Global Power in 2025, Driving Half of Worldwide Demand Growth
The Energy Institute's first-ever data-center electricity tally shows America's AI build-out reshaping global generation requirements at an accelerating pace.
The Energy Institute's 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy, published late August (2026-08-23), included global data-center electricity consumption for the first time in the review's 75-year history. Drawing on S&P Global data, it showed worldwide data-center power use growing nearly 20% year-on-year in 2025, and roughly 92% since 2020, when global consumption stood at 410.8 TWh.7,6,8
The U.S. share of that total was 312.6 TWh in 2025, equal to 39.7% of global data-center demand. China ranked second at 205.7 TWh, or 26.1%, while Europe accounted for 144.6 TWh, or 18.4%. The rest of Asia-Pacific consumed 63.2 TWh, with remaining demand spread across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Canada.7
The U.S. concentration of growth was more striking than its share of the total. Global data-center electricity demand rose by around 129.6 TWh in 2025. American consumption went from 249.0 TWh in 2024 to 312.6 TWh, a gain of 63.5 TWh, making the United States responsible for roughly 49% of the entire worldwide increase.7
That pace was not what analysts were projecting a decade ago. In 2014, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated U.S. data centers consumed about 70 TWh, equal to 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption at the time. The same report forecast only 73 TWh by 2020. Actual 2025 data-center consumption reached 312.6 TWh, more than four times that earlier forecast, reflecting how dramatically the AI build-out has outrun the demand models researchers were working from.2,7
Averaged since 2020, global data-center electricity has grown at roughly 14% per year. No large grid was designed for that trajectory. But in the United States, total electricity demand rose 3% in 2025, and a 13% increase in coal-fired generation that year shows the system pulling every available dispatchable megawatt to keep up.4,5,7
The load intensity is shifting alongside the volume. The IEA's 2026 update on energy and AI projects that a single advanced server rack could carry a peak power draw equivalent to 65 households by 2027. For transmission planners, that means AI compute clusters arrive as dense, near-continuous blocks, not the diffuse, variable loads that traditional capacity modeling has assumed.3
China's 205.7 TWh, while well behind the United States in absolute terms, reflects substantial infrastructure commitment and continued build-out. Growth across the rest of Asia-Pacific, at 63.2 TWh in aggregate, adds further load on regional LNG supply chains. JKM Asian LNG stood at $24.02/MMBtu going into the weekend, with Chinese data-center expansion among the factors traders track as a driver of sustained spot demand.7
Europe's 144.6 TWh sits in a power market where generation costs carry different weight. ICE Endex TTF front-month settled at €71.95/MWh on Friday (2026-09-04), with THE M+1 at €73.22/MWh, keeping gas-fired generation the price-setting technology across most European markets most hours. European data-center operators face power costs that make energy intensity a live margin question in ways that U.S. operators, with cheaper gas and different grid structures, currently do not.7
For power and gas traders, the 2027 IEA rack-density projection sets a concrete timeline for a step change in load intensity on U.S. grids. If next-generation AI hardware ships at the power densities the agency projects, load curves in PJM and ERCOT could steepen substantially beyond what current interconnection queue filings show. Newcastle coal physical stood at $138.25 per tonne going into the weekend, sustained partly by Asian utilities still building generation capacity for AI-intensive economies. That 2027 benchmark is close enough that utility resource planning cycles already underway will either anticipate the load or confront it.3,1,7