Share of total electricity demand used by data centers
- Description
Data center electricity consumption as a share of total electricity demand of the country or region. Data centers power a wide range of online services beyond AI, such as streaming services and cloud storage. The data does not allow a separate estimate for AI use.
- Data source
- International Energy Agency (2025); International Energy Agency (2026); Ember (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
- Unit
- %
- Date range
- 2020-2025
- Last updated
- 2026-06-30
- Next expected update
- 2027-06-30
- Managed by
- Pablo Rosado and Edouard Mathieu
- This indicator shows what share of a country’s or region’s total electricity demand comes from data centers.
- It covers total data-center electricity use (including cooling and other support systems), across both general-purpose and AI-specialized servers.
- The IEA does not publish a regional aggregate for Eurasia, which includes Russia.
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Frequently asked questions
How did Our World in Data process this data?
How did Our World in Data process this data?
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
We combine two sources: data center electricity consumption from the IEA (the numerator) and total electricity demand from Ember (the denominator).
For each region, we build the denominator by summing Ember's electricity demand across the IEA member countries in that region. For the global estimate, we use Ember's world total directly rather than summing across the IEA's regional aggregates. The IEA does not publish a Eurasia aggregate in this dataset, and Eurasia includes Russia — one of the world's largest electricity consumers — so summing across the IEA regions would exclude Eurasia entirely and undercount global electricity demand.
This produces a global share of approximately 1.5% in 2025, consistent with the IEA's own reporting.
Data sources
International Energy Agency – Energy and AI
International Energy Agency – Energy and AI
International Energy Agency (IEA), 'Energy and AI'. Published online at iea.org. Retrieved from: 'https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/energy-and-ai' [online resource]Ember – Yearly Electricity Data Europe
Ember – Yearly Electricity Data Europe
This dataset contains yearly electricity generation, capacity, emissions, imports and demand data for European countries.
You can find more about Ember's methodology in this document.
Ember – Yearly Electricity Data Europe (2026).
Most of the data is taken from the European Commission's Eurostat annual data.Ember – Yearly Electricity Data
Ember – Yearly Electricity Data
This dataset contains yearly electricity generation, capacity, emissions, import and demand data for over 200 geographies.
You can find more about Ember's methodology in this document.
Ember – Yearly Electricity Data (2026).
The data is collected from multi-country datasets (EIA, Eurostat, Energy Institute, UN) as well as national sources (e.g China data from the National Bureau of Statistics).How to cite
How to cite this page
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of total electricity demand used by data centers”, part of the following publication: Edouard Mathieu, Charlie Giattino, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Artificial Intelligence”. Data adapted from International Energy Agency, Ember. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261102-112946/grapher/data-centers-share-electricity-demand.html [online resource] (archived on November 2, 2026).How to cite this data
How to cite this data
If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
International Energy Agency (2025); International Energy Agency (2026); Ember (2026) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
International Energy Agency (2025); International Energy Agency (2026); Ember (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of total electricity demand used by data centers” [dataset]. International Energy Agency, “Energy and AI”; Ember, “Yearly Electricity Data Europe”; Ember, “Yearly Electricity Data” [original data]. Retrieved November 2, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261102-112946/grapher/data-centers-share-electricity-demand.html (archived on November 2, 2026).All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately. This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
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