125 Data Centers = Electricity Guzzlers AI and energy observations / quotes (in italics) here and the two pages that follow are from ‘World Energy Outlook Special Report – Energy and AI’ (link) from IEA (International Energy Agency)* – 4/10/25 To understand where energy infrastructure is heading, it helps to examine the rising tension between AI capability and electrical supply. The growing scale and sophistication of artificial intelligence is demanding an extraordinary amount of computational horsepower, primarily from AI-focused data centers. These facilities – purpose-built to train and serve models – are starting to rival traditional heavy industry in their electricity consumption. There is no AI without energy – specifically electricity (p. 3). Data centers accounted for around 1.5% of the world’s electricity consumption in 2024 (p. 14). Energy demand growth has been rapid: 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 (p. 14). As power demand rises, so too does its concentration: The United States accounted for…[45% of global data centre electricity consumption], followed by China (25%) and Europe (15%)… nearly half of data centre capacity in the United States is in five regional clusters (p. 14). The flipside is true as well: Emerging and developing economies other than China account for 50% of the world’s internet users but less than 10% of global data centre capacity (p. 18)…