AI's appetite for power could double datacenter electricity bills by 2030

A study predicts that US power consumption from datacenters will more than double by 2030.

The forecast comes from Rystad Energy in its latest report on US power demand and supply, which includes figures for datacenters in particular. The analysts estimate that datacenter power demand will sit at 307 terawatt hours (TWh), more than double the 130 TWh the firm says was consumed in 2023.

The reasoning behind rapidly increasing power draw is the usual suspect. "The growth in electricity demand for datacenters will be heavily driven by those focused on artificial intelligence (AI)," Rystad says, "which consumes more electricity compared to traditional computing."

To meet this demand, Rystad says the best energy sources for datacenters will be renewables thanks to their scalability and increasing viability. Consequently, wind energy supply is expected to just about double by 2030, while solar will roughly triple, if the calculations are correct. Power generated by coal will decrease by about half, though won't be totally eliminated.

Although a doubling of datacenter power consumption in just over five years sounds extreme, Rystad's forecast is actually one of the more moderate predictions. In April, Goldman Sachs published [PDF] its take on datacenter power usage and figured that consumption would nearly triple by 2030, with much of that demand being driven by AI.

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The two firms, however, are clearly working with fairly different sets of numbers, since Goldman Sachs estimates current datacenter power consumption to be around 400 TWh while Rystad says it's 130 TWh.

Yet even Goldman Sach's prediction isn't the most extreme we've ever seen. Arm CEO Rene Haas has repeatedly shared his belief that a full quarter of US power will go towards datacenters thanks to the AI revolution. For reference, Goldman Sachs claims a figure of eight percent based on its data. Rystad doesn't offer a similar metric at all.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is on the same page as Haas and says global electricity usage from datacenters will double by 2026. Although the IEA doesn't provide data specifically for the US, its report does mention that a third of all datacenters are located in the states, which implies that the IEA expects datacenter power consumption to increase substantially in the US as well as the wider world. ®