U.S. Data Centers Consumed Nearly 40% of Global Data Center Electricity in 2025, Energy Institute Review Shows
Energy Institute data place U.S. data centers at 312.6 TWh in 2025, with American demand accounting for roughly half of the worldwide increase.
For the first time in its 75-year history, the Energy Institute's 2026 Statistical Review of World Energy tracked global data center electricity consumption. The data, published in late August (2026-08-27), placed U.S. facilities at 312.6 terawatt-hours in 2025 — 39.7% of worldwide demand and the largest share of any single country in the review's inaugural data series.7,6
The scale of year-on-year change compounds the headline share. U.S. data centers added 63.5 TWh between 2024 and 2025, rising from 249.0 TWh to 312.6 TWh, and that single-country increment accounted for roughly 49% of the entire global increase of 129.6 TWh, the Statistical Review data show. No other geography came close.7
China ranked second at 205.7 TWh, or 26.1% of global data center electricity. Europe accounted for 144.6 TWh, or 18.4%. The rest of Asia-Pacific added another 63.2 TWh, with the remaining load distributed across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the rest of North America.7
Pull the frame back to 2020 and the trajectory sharpens. Global data center electricity demand stood at 410.8 TWh that year; by 2025 it had risen roughly 92%, at an average annual rate of approximately 14%, according to the Statistical Review. U.S. consumption in 2025 alone was up nearly 20%.7
A decade earlier, none of this looked inevitable. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report estimated U.S. data centers consumed around 70 billion kilowatt-hours in 2014 — roughly 70 TWh, equal to 1.8% of total U.S. electricity use — with further growth projected at just 4% per year out to 2020. The same report noted that server shipments grew at 15% annually between 2000 and 2005, doubling the number of servers in operation over that period. The actual 2025 data center electricity figure is more than four times the 2014 base.1
The IEA's 2026 update "Key Questions on Energy and AI" quantified the hardware density driving the shift. By 2027, the agency estimated, a single server rack in an advanced data center could carry peak power demand equivalent to 65 households. Spread that across a facility running tens of thousands of racks and the load resembles a mid-sized town attaching to a substation.2
The generation mix effects are already showing up in annual data. U.S. coal-fired generation rose 13% in 2025 even as overall U.S. electricity demand climbed 3%, according to OilPrice reporting on the Energy Institute's review. In regions with limited grid headroom, data center load has cleared on whatever generation could run.4,3
Power availability, not capital, is now the binding constraint on build-out pace. DataM Intelligence reported in July (2026-07-16) that the AI data center market had entered a phase where investment is available and customers are willing to sign long-term capacity contracts, but interconnection delays and equipment lead times are deciding where new facilities get built.5
U.S. grid operators are already managing interconnection queues that determine where the next tranche of capacity lands. If annual demand growth of roughly 14% continues, processing rates for new interconnection requests will need to rise substantially above historical norms — and the IEA's 2027 rack-density projection suggests the megawatt requirement per new facility will keep climbing, not shrink.2,7