What does AI draw from the grid?
The Load
Data centres were a flat line on the grid for the best part of a decade, until the cloud and then AI. Few countries meter them. Ireland does: there they took 23% of the electricity in 2025.
Ask about this section
- How much of the world's electricity do data centres use today?
- Which of these figures are measured and which are modelled?
- Why do the per-query numbers from different sources disagree so much?
Twenty Years of Data Centres estimate
The share of a country's electricity that data centres take, since 2000: Ireland and the Netherlands metered, the rest modelled, one line per published study. Inside the view: How much, by region · What 2030 could look like.
Why did data-centre electricity use stay flat for so long before AI took off? →Every series is one author's model or estimate, kept separate; only the Irish and Dutch series are metered. The 2030 figures are scenarios: what given inputs would produce.
Where the Load Sits measured
Data-centre electricity by region in the latest year, and the share of national demand it takes, with Ireland as the outlier.
Why is Ireland's data-centre share so much higher than anyone else's? →Only Ireland's and the Netherlands' figures are metered. Every other region is a modelled estimate by its author, and definitions of a data centre differ between them.
The Cost of a Token self-reported
Joules per generated token, measured on the graphics chip (GPU) for dozens of open models, and how much the answer grows once the whole building is counted. Inside the view: Energy per generated token, by model and GPU.
How much energy does one AI question use? →Benchmark figures are GPU-only under lab conditions. Facility energy depends entirely on the server-overhead and PUE (cooling and building overhead) assumptions shown as sliders. Google's median covers text prompts only. Method: Energy per token.
Tokens as Grid Load scenario
How many tokens (fragments of text) AI companies say they process, each in its own unit, and what those volumes would draw from the grid at three energy costs per token, next to Ireland for scale. Inside the view: Implied electricity per disclosure, TWh a year.
Why can't the Google and OpenAI numbers be added together? →An illustrative estimate: a disclosed volume multiplied by an assumed energy per token. It measures no company's electricity use; read the whole range. Method: Implied data-centre load.
Where the Electricity Comes From estimate
Three ways of counting the fuel behind data-centre electricity give three answers for the same place and year, each correct on its own terms: the grid mix, the IEA's marginal scenario and the companies' own claims.
Is AI running on gas or on renewables? →Location-based shares are Ember's measured grid mix applied to each region's data-centre total (an estimate by the International Energy Agency, IEA; for Ireland, the figure metered by its Central Statistics Office, CSO). Marginal shares are an IEA scenario, market shares the companies' own claims.