According to a new report by BloombergNEF shared by Techcrunch, plans to build data centers show no signs of declining, as new centers will need 2.7 times more than the industry's current electricity needs in the next decade.
By 2035, data centers will consume 106 gigawatt, a sharp increase compared to the current 40 gigawatt. Most of this growth will occur in rural areas as infrastructure expands in scale and locations near urban areas become scarce.
The main driver of this growth is the huge scale of planned data centers. Currently, only 10% of data centers consume more than 50 megawatt of electricity, but in the next decade, each new facility will consume an average of more than 100 megawatt.
At the same time, the usage rate of all data centers is expected to increase from 59% to 69% when AI training and reasoning increases to nearly 40% of the total calculation capability of data centers.
AI companies are racing to build more powerful data centers, contributing to boosting global investment in these facilities to 580 billion USD in 2025. This figure is even greater than the cost the world spends to search for new oil supplies.
Even the forecast for data center electricity consumption demand by 2035 has increased by 36% compared to the level released by BloombergNEF in April this year.
This additional consumption increase is largely due to projects being planned in the US states of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and New Jersey. They are located in an area well known by industry experts at PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization responsible for operating the grid in these states and other states, including Delaware, West Virginia, part of Kentucky and North Carolina.
The report was made in the context that PJM Interconnection is being monitored by the independent monitoring unit Monitoring Analytics. The group filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), saying PJM only has the authority to grant a license to connect to a new data center when its grid is at full capacity.
