UN Report: Data Centers Consumed 448 TWh in 2023, Projected to Reach 935 TWh by 2030 as AI Share Grows

Global data centers used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity last year, exceeding the consumption of all but 10 countries, according to a United Nations University report issued Wednesday. 2 trillion gallons of water to produce the energy, the report said. The study also found that data centers currently account for about 20 percent of their energy use to artificial intelligence.

By 2030, data centers are projected to consume 935 trillion watt-hours, nearly 3 percent of global electricity demand. If treated as a single country, data centers would rank sixth in worldwide power use that year and would emit nearly 440 million tons of carbon dioxide, the report stated. AI’s share of data-center energy consumption is expected to reach 40 percent by then.

Kaveh Madani, a water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada, said the figures show demand on a national scale. “If you look at these numbers, we’re seeing scales comparable to nations. The demand is enormous,” he said.

The report predicts that data-center water and energy use and associated pollution will double within four years. It noted that a typical ChatGPT-style query uses about 200 times more energy than basic text classification in an email spam filter. 3 billion watt-hours to train, while the next version used 50 to 70 billion watt-hours.

Miriam Aczel, a United Nations University environmental policy researcher and co-author, said about 90 percent of AI power use comes from operational requests rather than training. 5 billion prompts a day, she said. Reducing word count in AI requests by 30 percent can cut energy use by 25 percent, saving electricity comparable to annual consumption by 700,000 people in Africa, the report found.