Since 2022, AI -related firms have stormed the S&P 500 market — growing by $12 trillion dollars.

The IEA just posted a whole report dedicated to AI. The demand from data-centers is so large in some places it is already rivaling the kind of monster consumption we are used to seeing from aluminum smelters. There are six states in the United States where data centers already consume over 10% of the electricity supply. In Ireland, data centers swallow about 20% of the electricity.

Currently, a normal data center consumes the same amount of electricity as 100,000 houses. But the new gargantuan data centers under construction will consume 20 times as much — equivalent to adding 2 million homes to the grid.

Data centers of the world are not spread evenly. In Virginia, the largest conglomeration of industrial data, their demand for power pulls in a quarter of the state's electricity.

Australia is being left behind, because we won't build coal plants in case we offend the UN, and we banned nuclear power as a fashion statement in 1998. The AI global race is on, but digital machines need reliable cheap electricity and lots of it.

Also not looking sparkling on the graph above — New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Canada.

Sometime between now and 2030 (which is like 'next week') the world has to build a new network the size of Japan's national grid — the fourth largest economy in the world.

Data centres accounted for around 1.5% of the world's electricity consumption in 2024, or 415 terawatt-hours (TWh). The United States accounted for the largest share of global data centre electricity consumption in 2024 (45%), followed by China (25%) and Europe (15%). Globally, data centre electricity consumption has grown by around 12% per year since 2017, more than four times faster than the rate of total electricity consumption. AI-focused data centres can draw as much electricity as power-intensive factories such as aluminium smelters, but they are much more geographically concentrated. Nearly half of data centre capacity in the United States is in five regional clusters.

Data centre electricity consumption is set to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030. This is slightly more than Japan's total electricity consumption today.

There is no single factor driving up electricity demand more than AI at the moment:

In the United States, data centres account for nearly half of electricity demand growth between now and 2030. By the end of the decade, the country is set to consume more electricity for data centres than for the production of aluminium, steel, cement, chemicals and all other energy-intensive goods combined.