Data centres used 4.4% of US electricity in 2023. 12% by 2028?

ecogpt.coPublished Oct 21, 2026 · 2 min read

Berkeley Lab's report for the Department of Energy is the most cited US figure: 176 TWh in 2023 and a 2028 range from 325 to 580 TWh. What explains a range that wide, and what would each end mean for the grid.

US data-centre consumption more than doubled from 76 TWh in 2018 to 176 TWh in 2023.
The 2028 low case assumes slower AI deployment and faster efficiency; the high case assumes continued GPU shipments at 2024 rates.
At the high end, data centres would take a share of US electricity comparable to the entire residential cooling load.
Virginia's permitted backup generators alone total 27 GW, a sign of how concentrated the load is.

The report

In December 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory delivered its data-centre energy report to the US Department of Energy. The numbers are now the standard reference: 76 TWh in 2018 (1.9% of US electricity), 176 TWh in 2023 (4.4%), and a 2028 projection of 325 to 580 TWh, which would be 6.7% to 12% of national consumption.

Why the range

The low case assumes AI accelerator shipments slow, that chips keep getting more efficient per operation, and that some announced capacity never gets built. The high case assumes shipments continue at the pace of 2024 and that the chips run close to flat out. The gap between the two, 255 TWh, is larger than the entire 2023 figure. It is an honest range; it is also useless for planning a transmission line, which is why utilities are quoting the high end.

Where the load comes from

Three companies in the index disclose their electricity: Google used about 43 TWh in 2025 (up 37%), Microsoft 37 TWh (up 24%), Meta 18.4 TWh in 2024. Those are global figures, but most of the load sits in the United States. Amazon does not disclose a total. Together the four hold roughly 13 million H100-equivalents of AI compute by Epoch's count. Add OpenAI's million-plus GPUs across Azure and Stargate and the US share of the global 415 TWh starts to look conservative.

What 12% would mean

The United States used about 4,000 TWh in 2023. Twelve percent is 480 TWh, in the same range as the country's entire residential air-conditioning load. Grids are built for peaks, and data centres run close to flat, so the capacity question is less dramatic than the energy question; but the energy question is the carbon question. Every terawatt-hour added at the margin is supplied by whatever plant was not running, which on most US grids is gas.

The generators are the tell

Latitude Media's count of permitted backup generators gives a sense of the build-out's concentration: Virginia alone has permitted roughly 10,500 data-centre generators totalling 27 GW of diesel capacity, nearly tripling in a few years. Those are emergency units, rarely run, but their number is a direct measure of how much load has been built where.

What the index does with it

Nothing, directly. Company scores depend on company disclosures. But the national figure is why the carbon pillar weighs grid intensity and hourly matching so heavily: at this scale, the choice between annual certificates and clean power delivered on the night shift is the difference between a gas build-out and a clean one.