The expansion of artificial intelligence is best read as an infrastructure race whose limiting factor is increasingly electricity. Data centres used around 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2024, roughly 1.5% of global electricity demand, and the International Energy Agency’s base case puts their consumption at about 945 TWh by 2030.
AI is accelerating that demand within the wider data-centre market. The IEA projects that electricity demand from AI-optimised facilities will more than quadruple in its base case, while electricity use by AI-optimised servers is expected to rise from 93 TWh in 2025 to around 432 TWh by 2030.
The pace of computing demand helps explain the pressure. AI computing requirements have roughly doubled every six months since 2010, while electricity use by AI-focused data centres grew 50% in 2025, according to the IEA. AI server power density also rose 11 times between 2020 and 2025.
Technology companies are committing capital on a similarly large scale. McKinsey estimates worldwide data-centre capital expenditure will need to reach about $6.7 trillion by 2030, including $5.2 trillion for AI-capable facilities. Annual capital expenditure on AI data centres is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2028.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Oracle are projected to have combined capital expenditure exceeding $610 billion in 2026, with roughly $450 billion tied directly to AI infrastructure. Five large technology companies had capital expenditure of more than USD 400 billion in 2025, a figure expected to rise by another 75% in 2026.
The constraint is that data centres can be delivered much faster than the systems that supply them. A data centre can be built in one to two years, while transmission takes far longer and new clean generation, particularly nuclear, takes longer still. That gap puts electricity consumers and grid stability under pressure in areas where facilities are concentrated, while creating regulatory barriers and possible delays for investors seeking to deploy AI infrastructure.
Ireland shows how quickly the issue can move from a planning concern to a connection constraint. Data centres accounted for 23% of the country’s metered electricity in 2025, up from 5% in 2015. The regulator expects their share could reach about 31% by 2034.
Dublin imposed a de facto halt on standard new data-centre connections in 2021. Ireland’s regulator now requires new large facilities to bring their own generation or storage.
Frankfurt faces a comparable squeeze. Data centres account for up to 40% of the city’s power demand, and the local operator has told new applicants to expect connection dates beyond 2032.
The US held the largest share of global data-centre electricity consumption in 2024, at 45%, followed by China at 25% and Europe at 15%. US data centres consumed 183 terawatt-hours of electricity that year.
The central uncertainty is whether grids, transmission and clean generation can expand on a timetable that matches AI infrastructure. The investment case for new facilities depends on securing power, yet the construction cycle for the power system remains far longer than the one to two years needed to build the facilities themselves.
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