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The world’s most authoritative energy forecaster just quantified what the tech industry has been whispering about for two years: AI is about to become one of the biggest electricity consumers on the planet. The International Energy Agency’s April 2025 “Energy and AI” report projects that global data center power consumption will more than double by 2030, climbing from roughly 415 TWh in 2024 to approximately 945 TWh.
To put that in perspective, 945 TWh is close to the entire annual electricity consumption of France and Germany combined. And it would represent nearly 3% of all global electricity demand, up from a much smaller slice today.
The numbers behind the surge
Data center electricity use has been growing at about 12% annually since 2019. The IEA expects that pace to accelerate to roughly 15% per year through the end of the decade, driven almost entirely by AI workloads running on accelerated servers rather than traditional computing tasks.
The geographic concentration is striking. The United States and China alone are forecast to account for nearly 80% of the total increase in data center electricity demand. The US is expected to add approximately 240 TWh of data center load by 2030, a 130% jump from 2024 levels. That single increase would represent nearly half of all projected growth in total US electricity demand over the same period.
Investment is already pouring in to match the ambition. Data center spending hit roughly $500 billion in 2024, nearly double what it was just two years earlier in 2022.
On the supply side, the IEA expects renewable energy to meet about 50% of the incremental data center demand by 2030. Natural gas and coal together are projected to cover more than 40% in the near term, with nuclear filling in depending on regional availability.
Why the grid is the real bottleneck
Data centers can be built in 18 to 24 months. New transmission lines and generation capacity often take five to ten years to permit and construct. That mismatch is creating real stress on existing grids, particularly in regions like Northern Virginia, central Texas, and parts of the US Southeast where data center clusters are already straining local power systems.
The agency’s findings highlight an urgent need for expedited permitting processes and diversified energy generation sources.
Market implications and the crypto dimension
But there’s a tension worth watching. If data centers consume an increasingly large share of new power capacity, other electricity-intensive industries could face crowding-out effects. Bitcoin mining operations, which compete for many of the same resources, including cheap power, grid interconnection, and favorable regulatory environments, may find themselves in a tighter market.
Several publicly traded Bitcoin miners have already begun pivoting toward AI hosting and high-performance computing precisely because the economics of selling power-intensive infrastructure to AI customers can be more predictable than mining returns tied to volatile crypto prices. Companies like Core Scientific and Hut 8 have made this transition a central part of their corporate strategy, leveraging existing power contracts and data center shells to serve AI workloads.
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