Gartner recently released a report that data center power consumption has increased dramatically, and in the near future, the demand for electricity consumption by this sector will far exceed the ability of power supply companies to build power infrastructure to meet demand.
The report said that power consumption by data centers globally will increase by 26 percent from 447TWh (terawatt hours) in 2025 to 565TWh this year. According to Linglan Wang, director of analysis at Gartner, one of the biggest constraints to data center development and operation is the global supply of electricity, which cannot keep up with the pace of data center development.
In fact, global power supply demand for data center development and operation is seen to have increased to 132GW by the end of this year, from 104GW last year, showing a 27 percent increase in demand year-on-year. Even more surprising, this year’s demand is for undeveloped power capacity, and that figure is expected to jump to 290GW by 2030.
It will come as no surprise to many that the report also says that data centers optimized for AI services (generative and otherwise) are the main driver of the increase in data center electricity consumption this year. According to Gartner, 31 percent of electricity consumption is from data centers optimized for AI services and technologies alone.
When electricity consumption is compared by sector (conventional data centers vs. AI data centers), power consumption by data centers optimized for AI services will increase by as much as 83.6 percent in 2025 (83.6 TWh), and will increase by a further 84.2 percent year-on-year in 2026 (175 TWh), and will surpass total conventional data center electricity consumption by 2027 (258 TWh).
Not only that, the amount of power needed to power cooling infrastructure and others is also estimated to increase to 243 TWh by 2027 and overall it is estimated that by the end of next year, the global data center industry alone is estimated to use 702 TWh of electricity to function.
In line with the power supply demand of 290GW by 2030, Gartner estimates that the data center industry will use 1200 TWh for their operations alone. This is where the biggest issue for this industry can be seen, where the global power supply grid will not be able to develop the infrastructure at the rate needed to accommodate these operations.
Previously we have also reported that companies such as Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have already started thinking about or are developing power supply grids using nuclear energy for power generation that is not only clean, but with sufficient capacity to power their AI data center dreams.
