Data Centers: Power Demand Expected to Double by 2026

Data centers, often likened to massive, windowless warehouses, are essential to modern digital infrastructure, housing thousands of servers that operate continuously. With an astounding size that can reach that of four football fields, larger data centers consume as much electricity as 880,000 households at any given moment. As of 2022, there are over 8,000 data centers globally, with the United States housing the largest share. Alarmingly, data centers, alongside artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, accounted for approximately 2% of total global electricity demand in 2022. Predictions indicate that by 2026, this figure could double, paralleling the electricity consumption of an entire country such as Sweden. The surge in demand is attributed to several contributing factors — the growing need for cloud storage solutions, skyrocketing electricity usage by cryptocurrency mining activities, and the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, which requires significant computational power. Without proactive measures, this trend could have substantial implications on global energy resources and environmental sustainability.