U.S. data centers’ electricity use could double by 2030, DOE lab says

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.”

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