A Japan-Sized Load by 2030: The IEA Puts Numbers on AI's Power Appetite

For two years the debate about artificial intelligence and electricity has run on company announcements, utility pipelines and back-of-envelope arithmetic. On 10 April the International Energy Agency published its special report Energy and AI, the first attempt by a major intergovernmental body to build a consistent global baseline. Its central projection is easy to remember. Electricity consumption by data centres worldwide, about 415 TWh in 2024, is set to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, slightly more than Japan's total electricity consumption today.

The report's value lies less in the headline than in the breakdown. It tells us where the load is, how fast it has been growing, how it is likely to be supplied and where the bottlenecks sit. Data centres used about 1.5 per cent of the world's electricity in 2024. The United States accounted for 45 per cent of that consumption, China for 25 per cent and Europe for 15 per cent. Emerging and developing economies other than China account for half of the world's internet users but less than 10 per cent of global data centre capacity.

That gap matters for the next decade, because it means that much of the world's digital activity is hosted far from where the users are, and that countries hoping to build domestic AI capacity will first need reliable and affordable power. AI is the most important driver of growth, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030. The United States accounts for by far the largest share of the projected increase, followed by China.

Fatih Birol, the IEA's executive director, said data centres are on course to account for almost half of electricity demand growth in the United States, more than half in Japan, and as much as one-fifth in Malaysia. The report's suggested responses are practical: locate new data centres where power and grid capacity are available, and operate servers or on-site generation and storage more flexibly. The report's sensitivity cases deserve as much attention as the base case.