Data centres now draw about 1.5 percent of the world's electricity
Every search, stream and chatbot reply runs through a building full of servers. Worldwide, those buildings consumed roughly 415 terawatt hours in 2024, about 1.5 percent of global electricity, and the International Energy Agency expects that to more than double by 2030. The biggest single sites already pull over 3,000 megawatts.
A data centre is simply a room, building or campus that stores, processes and distributes digital information, kept at the right temperature by environmental controls. IBM traces the idea back to the 1940s and the US military's ENIAC computer. Modern examples may hold thousands of servers linked by miles of high-speed cabling, and the very largest cover up to 10 million square feet.
They come in several kinds. Enterprise centres serve one organisation's own needs; in 2014 they accounted for more than 60 percent of American server energy use, but by 2023 only about 10 percent, as work shifted elsewhere. Colocation centres rent space, power and cooling to many tenants and often host the meeting points where internet networks and undersea cables connect. Hyperscale facilities, usually above 100 megawatts, run cloud services and AI training; there were 1,136 of them by the end of 2024, double the number five years earlier, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google operating about 59 percent of capacity. Smaller edge sites of 1 to 10 megawatts sit close to users to cut delay.
Hyperscale and colocation together handled around 74 percent of US server energy in 2023, up from under 40 percent in 2014, and that share is projected to reach 85 percent by 2028. The United States has almost nine times as many data centres as any other country, and they are forecast to account for nearly half its growth in electricity demand through 2030.
The economic stakes are large. A PwC analysis credited the American industry with about $486 billion in GDP and 4.2 million jobs in 2021. Worries over power, water and local costs have fuelled opposition in Europe, the United States and South America; one tracker found $64 billion of projects blocked or delayed between May 2024 and March 2025.
Source: Data center
