Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report: data centers could account for 6.7% to 12% of US total electricity consumption by 2028, up from ~4% currently
Context & Ripple Effects
An earlier IEA assessment of data-center, crypto, and AI power demand had already challenged the assumption that efficiency alone would keep digital infrastructure a marginal electricity load. LBNL’s US-specific range turns that broad concern into a planning issue for a single power system.
The importance is not only the projected consumption level but the breadth of the range: utilities and developers must make long-lived grid and site decisions while the eventual load remains uncertain. Later coverage projecting data centers could account for nearly half of US demand growth reinforces how quickly this has become an infrastructure question.
First-order effects
- Utilities, grid planners, and data-center developers must incorporate a potentially much larger load into capacity, interconnection, and transmission planning; access to power becomes a more immediate constraint on new facilities.
- The wide projected range increases uncertainty around load forecasts, complicating decisions on when and where to add grid capacity and connect new campuses.
Second-order effects
- Competition for energized sites and available interconnection capacity is likely to intensify, favoring developers that can secure power earlier and making electricity availability a more important factor in data-center location decisions.
- Utilities face greater pressure to determine how data-center-related grid upgrades are planned and paid for, especially where concentrated load creates local reliability or power-quality concerns.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory holds, data centers will be treated less like ordinary commercial customers and more like utility-scale infrastructure, tying compute expansion to generation, transmission, and regulatory timelines.
- The scale and uncertainty of the load strengthen the case for standardized reporting and oversight; the planned nationwide EIA survey of data-center energy use points toward more formal measurement of the sector’s grid impact.
The trend: AI-era compute is making electric power, grid access, and energized land core constraints on data-center expansion rather than secondary operating inputs.