US data centers will consume 20% of the nation's electricity by 2035

American data centers are on track to gobble up a fifth of all U.S. electricity by 2035. That’s a fourfold jump from today’s levels, driven almost entirely by the breakneck pace of AI development. BloombergNEF dropped the new estimate this week, and the numbers are stark: nearly 200 gigawatts of new capacity over the next decade, with roughly half of that feeding AI training and inference workloads. And if you think those projections sound aggressive, the reality is probably bigger. The same consultancy’s forecast from just last December was 83% lower. They’re not alone in scrambling to catch up — EPRI has more than doubled its own 2024 estimate, and S&P’s numbers swelled by over a third between October and April.

The grid isn’t ready. Most of this new load will slam into regions already running hot. The PJM Interconnection, a massive grid operator stretching from Virginia to Illinois, will see 34% of its power siphoned off by data centers. ERCOT in Texas isn’t far behind at 22%. PJM is in a particularly tight spot. It froze new connection applications for four years while demand kept climbing, a decision that looks increasingly disastrous. The pause created a supply-demand mismatch so severe that wholesale electricity prices in the region shot up 76% over the past year. American Electric Power has even threatened to walk away from the interconnection entirely.

Despite those headaches, data center operators can’t stay away. They represented 38% of the charges in PJM’s latest capacity auction. The pull of existing fiber infrastructure and cheap land is too strong. By 2033, BloombergNEF expects the U.S. to host 64% of the world’s AI chips when measured by power demand. That concentration of compute in one country has no historical precedent.

But this isn’t just an American story. The global picture is equally wild. Under an aggressive adoption scenario, data centers worldwide will create 1,935 terawatt-hours of new electricity demand by 2033. For scale, that’s roughly what all of India consumes in a year. The question isn’t whether the AI boom will strain grids globally. It’s which grids will crack first, and what happens to electricity prices everywhere else when they do.