Chart of the month – June 2026. AI’s energy use may seem alarming, but at only 3% of global electricity use by 2040, we project it will stay below booming sectors like EV charging and space cooling. Total data centre energy use will grow four-fold to 2040, equalling 5% of all global electricity: 3% for AI and 2% for general-purpose data centres (those used for handling traditional workloads like data backup, streaming, and high-frequency trading).
With power-hungry data centres multiplying to service the rapid growth of AI applications, we find that the initial exponential growth in power demands will give way to a more linear – but still very steep – pattern over time. AI expansion is dependent on a capital-intensive data centre buildout and the electricity to run it. For the near- to medium-term, additional supply needed by data centres will come from fossil fuels and renewables, with regional variations.
What is tempering AI energy demand growth?
DNV's Energy Transition Outlook forecast assumes continued efficiency improvements and maturing assurance ecosystems, tempered by compute, energy, and integration bottlenecks that slow uptake of AI outside of those sectors to which it is well suited.
Computation per unit of energy has improved, doubling every three years. We expect this trend to continue with improvements in chip design and smaller node size. We also expect further efficiencies in the form of better architecture, algorithms, and cooling engineering at data centres – the combined effect of which will be multiplicative.
North America is still the data centre hot spot
There are large regional variations; but North America is the world region with the biggest data centre capacity – accounting for almost half of the global capacity – and will remain so until 2040. Data centres in Europe and China account for most of the rest of the world’s data centre capacity. By 2040, data centres’ share of electricity demand in North America will be 16%, 12% of which will be for AI.
Looking at short-term electricity growth, AI is the biggest driver of electricity consumption the next five years in North America. In Europe, EV charging growth far exceeds AI’s demand growth, as do both EV charging and the cooling of buildings in China and India.
You can find deeper analysis on AI's energy footprint or learn how we estimate AI energy demand in our Energy Transition Outlook.
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