The IEA’s 2026 executive summary projects global data-center electricity use rising from 485 TWh in 2025 to about 950 TWh in 2030.
Qualification: A global projection; it cannot be substituted for a U.S. forecast or a local grid impact study. It concerns all data centers, not exclusively AI workloads. IEA and LBNL models are not one harmonized dataset.
Primary sources: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai/executive-summary