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AI Is Booming And So Is Its Power Bill

As artificial intelligence becomes more common in everything from search engines to chatbots to video recommendations, it’s quietly putting massive pressure on the world’s electricity supply. A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) says data centers—the powerful facilities that run AI tools and store digital data—could more than double their energy use by 2030.

Today, data centers already use around 1.5% of the world’s electricity. But by 2030, they could consume as much power each year as an entire country like Japan. The surge is being driven by the intense computing demands of AI, which requires huge amounts of data to be processed at high speeds.

While companies are working to use cleaner energy, there’s concern that the growth of AI could outpace those efforts. This trend highlights the need for smarter, greener infrastructure to keep up with the digital world’s rapid expansion, because even the smartest tech has to plug in somewhere.

Data centers accounted for about 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption in 2024, an amount expected to double by 2030 because of AI use

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data center, artificial intelligence, energy, sustainability, english, ai, highlight

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