The American power grid is about to get stress-tested like never before. BloombergNEF now projects that US data centers will consume roughly 20% of the nation’s electricity by 2035, up from about 5.9% today. That’s not a typo. One-fifth of all electricity in the country, sucked up by humming rows of servers.
To put that in perspective, BNEF’s latest forecast pegs US data center power demand at 106 GW by 2035. That figure represents a 36% increase from the firm’s own April 2025 projection of 78 GW.
The numbers behind the surge
Right now, US data centers operate at around 40 GW of capacity, accounting for roughly 3.5% to 4% of total national electricity demand. BNEF’s base case scenario puts that share at approximately 8.6% by 2035.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has modeled high-growth scenarios where data center electricity consumption could reach 10% to 20% of US demand by 2035. The key variable pushing toward the upper end of that range: cryptocurrency mining combined with AI-driven compute.
