07What does AI draw from the grid?
Twenty Years of Data Centres: their share of each country's electricity
What share of each country's electricity goes to data centres, the buildings full of computers that run the internet and now AI?
Ireland's data centres took 23% of the country's metered electricity in 2025, up from 5% in 2015, metered by the CSO (Ireland's statistics office).
The Netherlands is metered too: about 4.6% in 2024 (CBS); the US share is modelled, about 4.4% in 2023 (LBNL).
The world total was about 416 TWh in 2024 (IEA, modelled); the IEA's 2030 cases run from 669 to 1 264 TWh.
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.
Each share is the author's own figure divided by that region's own metered or modelled total. Solid means metered; dashed means modelled by the study's author; hollow points are scenarios. Authors: CSO, Ireland's statistics office; CBS, the Dutch statistics office; EPA, the US Environmental Protection Agency; LBNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; JRC, the EU's Joint Research Centre; IEA, the International Energy Agency.
Shaded bands (World and US only) mark the eras: growth to 2010, the efficiency plateau to 2019, the rise of AI after 2020. The thin vertical line is 2025, where each panel's history ends and its scenarios begin. Europe (the IEA's definition) and the EU (the JRC's, which counts 28 member states) share one panel as two separate series.
Each line is its author's own scenario; Wattlas makes no forecast. The spread between the cases is the finding.
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