The 2024 US Data Center Energy Usage Report shows rising water and electricity demands from tech companies
Data centers, the facilities that house much of the computing equipment we rely on to navigate modern life, used less than 2% of the United States' electricity as recently as 2018. By now, that's doubled. And in 2028, they could be guzzling up as much as 12% of America's power.
That's all according to the 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, published Thursday by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The 79-page document is aimed, partially, at understanding how the advent of artificial intelligence technology will shift the country's power use. The proliferation of AI marks a new era for data centers' power demands, the report says; the vast warehouses of cutting-edge hardware that companies use to train and run AI models burn large amounts of electricity.
"There's so much difference in the industry between when we looked at it in 2016 and when we look at it now," Arman Shehabi, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab and the report's lead researcher, told Reuters. He led a 2016 version of the data center report, for which Congress requested a follow-up in a piece of 2020 legislation.
Since OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the tech industry's top companies have poured billions of dollars of investment into a massive buildup of data centers, aiming to train AI models that will reshape their businesses, computing and the tech economy at large. A few mind-boggling moments characterize the effort. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have each touted computing clusters made up of at least 100,000 high-end Nvidia chips; Google aimed for $48 billion in capital expenditures for a single year; Microsoft got the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, site of a 1979 nuclear accident, to reopen solely for its data centers.
Much of the Berkeley report is spent grappling with how to measure and estimate the AI-tied "surge in data center electricity demand." The researchers offer a range of possibilities for the coming years. The low estimate for 2028: Data centers' demand will not quite double, totaling 6.7% of United States consumption. The high estimate is 12%, a near tripling of 2023's terawatt-hour total.
Plus, it's not just power that's surging. The Berkeley researchers attempted to estimate data centers' total water usage onsite; 2023's total was about 66 billion liters. Their estimates for 2028's data center water usage range widely, from just under 150 billion to over 275 billion liters -- or 72.6 billion gallons.
"Hyperscale" data centers, built and used by tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, are a key part of the energy demand surge. Historically, data centers for companies' internal computing made up the lion's share of consumption; going forward, the "hyperscale" facilities and facilities where companies rent computing space will see the most growth, the report says. The researchers found that Virginia is currently the "primary hub" for those facilities, with California and Texas next behind.
The team wrote that its results show the need for more research, plus initiatives to meet data centers' short-term energy needs and prepare for an "economy-wide expansion of electricity infrastructure." Reuters reported in April that "nine of the top 10 U.S. electric utilities said data centers were a main source of customer growth."