Data centers could more than double their share of U.S. power and account for 9.5 to 15 percent of electricity use by decade’s end, according to a new analysis backed by the Department of Energy.
The long-awaited report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that pressure on the electricity grid from artificial intelligence is growing. The findings are the first major estimate from the lab on data centers’ future power use during the second Trump administration.
“Although successive generations of computing hardware improve in energy efficiency,” the report says, “the scale and growth of computational demand more than offset these efficiency gains, leading to continued increases in absolute electricity consumption.”
The assessment, which was posted on the lab’s website, comes amid skyrocketing electricity prices and pressure on utilities and regulators to ensure there is enough future power to feed the data center boom. On Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission launched a probe into whether regional grids are allocating the costs of grid upgrades fairly. That follows a rare Level 3 warning from North America’s grid watchdog in May about risks to the grid from large computational loads.
