How much electricity data centres and AI consume

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centres consumed 485 TWh of electricity in 2025, 17% more than the year before. For data centres built for artificial intelligence, the increase was 50%. By 2030 total consumption is expected to roughly double to 950 TWh, about 3% of the world's electricity use.

Source: IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI

Where is the electricity used?

In 2024 data centres accounted for about 1.5% of global electricity consumption. Of that, 45% was used by centres in the US, 25% in China and 15% in Europe. In the US, data centres are expected to make up almost half of the growth in electricity demand to 2030 and, by the end of the decade, to use more electricity than the production of aluminium, steel, cement, chemicals and all other energy-intensive goods combined.

A typical AI data centre uses as much electricity as 100,000 households. The largest ones now under construction will use up to twenty times as much.

Source: IEA, Energy and AI

Why is consumption rising when AI tasks are getting cheaper?

According to the IEA, the energy used per AI task is falling by at least an order of magnitude a year. A simple text query now uses less electricity than a television left on for the same length of time. If all ordinary web searches were replaced by simple AI queries, they would use less than 4 TWh a year, under 1% of data centre consumption.

Total consumption is still going up because AI is used more and more, and for heavier tasks. According to the IEA, video generation, reasoning and agentic tasks use hundreds to thousands of times more energy per query than a simple text query. The five largest technology companies invested over USD 400 billion in 2025, and their investment is set to grow by another 75% in 2026.

Source: IEA, Key Questions on Energy and AI

What did the first EU reporting round show?

Since 2024, data centres in the EU with an IT power demand of at least 500 kW have had to report every year on their energy and water use, waste heat reuse and share of renewable energy. In September 2026 the European Commission summed up the first reporting round in a report to the European Parliament and the Council:

PUE shows how much energy goes on cooling and other overheads on top of the servers themselves. A value of 1.36 means that every kilowatt-hour used by the servers comes with another 0.36 kWh. The global average is higher, at 1.52, according to the Uptime Institute's 2026 survey.

Sources: European Commission, Energy performance of data centres, Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2026

How does Czechia compare?

According to the Commission's first technical report, Czechia has an estimated 50 data centres that are required to report. In the first round, none of them did.

České Radiokomunikace is building one of the largest data centres in the region near Prague. In later phases it could become part of the Czech bid for an AI gigafactory. It is planned to have more than 2,000 racks and 26 MW of power, with the first clients expected in 2027. Even running non-stop at full power, it would use at most about 0.23 TWh a year. That is roughly 0.4% of Czech net electricity consumption, which was 59 TWh in 2025 according to the Energy Regulatory Office (ERÚ) (own calculation).

Sources: European Commission, technical report, České Radiokomunikace, ERÚ (in Czech)

What follows from this?

• Consumption is rising because AI is used more, and for heavier tasks. Individual tasks, meanwhile, are getting cheaper fast.
• In Czechia the issue is grid connection and location rather than total consumption. One large centre is a fraction of a percent of the country's consumption, but it needs a strong connection in a single place.
• Running data centres takes people. According to the Uptime Institute, 53% of operators have trouble finding qualified staff, up from 46% a year earlier.

Source: Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2026

Summary

• Data centres used 485 TWh in 2025, 17% more than the year before. Consumption is expected to double by 2030.
• Consumption per AI task, meanwhile, is falling at least tenfold a year.
• Data centres that reported data in the EU have an average PUE of 1.36, but waste heat is hardly used. No data came from Czechia in the first reporting round.

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As of 1 November 2026. IEA data from April 2026, Commission data from September 2026.

• data centres
• energy
• artificial intelligence