AI Will Soon Consume Almost Half of Data Center Energy

When people think about artificial intelligence, they often imagine clever chatbots or realistic images made by tools like MidJourney.

But there’s a side to AI that’s less visible and more serious: the massive amount of electricity it consumes.

All the clever prompts and quick answers you get come at a cost—an environmental one.

Right now, artificial intelligence is already responsible for a large share of the energy used by data centers, writes Videnskab.

These centers power the internet. They store data and run the servers that keep digital services alive.

According to a new study, AI services currently eat up around 20 percent of the total energy used by all the data centers in the world.

That number is expected to rise. By the end of the year, researchers believe that nearly half—49 percent—of the energy used by data centers will be spent on AI alone.

The study, published in the scientific journal Joule, paints a worrying picture of what’s ahead.

Using AI is far more power-hungry than many realize. For example, asking a single question to a chatbot like ChatGPT uses about 15 times more electricity than performing a regular Google search.

This puts more pressure on the global infrastructure that keeps the internet running.

But what are data centers, exactly? Think of them as giant buildings full of computers.

These machines store and process the huge amounts of data needed to keep websites, apps, and online services working smoothly.

As of March 2025, there are more than 10,000 data centers around the world. Over half of them are in the United States.

These centers already use more electricity each year than France. Even without counting the energy-heavy world of cryptocurrency, AI alone now uses almost as much power as the entire country of the Netherlands.

If predictions are correct, AI will soon surpass that too. The demand for AI services keeps growing.

But unless there’s a major shift in how they’re powered, their energy use might become one of the internet’s biggest challenges.