By Diana DiGangi of UtilityDive

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data centers will “increasingly skew more energy intensive” and that electricity consumed by them will increase across all commercial building stock, with their servers growing to make up an estimated 22% to 33% of commercial building electricity use by 2050, according to an April report.

In its 2026 Annual Energy Outlook, EIA modeled various scenarios to explore how much data centers might drive demand in the medium and long term. In its high electricity demand scenario, the agency assumed “growth in the installed stock of AI servers follows an exponential trend through 2050” and didn’t make any assumptions about increases in computational efficiency beyond historical trends. 

"These assumptions lead data center server energy use alone to grow to 818 billion kilowatt hours in 2050 in the High Electricity Demand case,” EIA said. “Server electricity consumption in 2050 is more than 16 times that in 2020.”

In its counterfactual base case, EIA models how “U.S. and world energy markets would operate through 2050 under laws and regulations in force as of December 2025,” but said that this “should not be regarded as the most likely of the cases.”

EIA projects that electricity consumption in the U.S. will continue to grow through 2050 at an annual rate of 0.9% to 1.6%, “with data center server energy use a major factor,” after the previous five years saw a 2.1% average annual demand increase, which followed 15 years of nearly flat demand.

“Energy use in commercial buildings, home to data center activity, grows more rapidly than in the residential or industrial sectors in all modeled cases,” the report said. In a Tuesday release, EIA noted that “across all cases, servers alone accounted for an estimated 7% of commercial sector electricity consumption in 2025.”

In both EIA’s high electricity demand scenario and its counterfactual base case, the commercial sector’s electricity intensity — measured in kilowatt hours of electricity consumed per square foot — eventually exceeds the 2003 historical high of 14.9 kWh per square foot for the first time in either 2031 or 2032, depending on the scenario.

In its counterfactual base case, EIA projects that “after 2040, servers will become increasingly efficient, resulting in a 10% reduction in average annual operational power draw every three years, above and beyond historical efficiency trends. However, continued growth in server installations drives overall consumption growth.”