How much energy do data centres use?

Why it matters

Total facility energy has two parts. The IT equipment covers computation, memory, storage and networking. Facility overhead covers cooling, lighting and power distribution. The ratio of total facility energy to IT energy is PUE. Energy is the base figure from which a data centre's carbon emissions and water use are worked out.

Demand is growing fastest in AI-focused data centres. Because data centres cluster in particular regions, the effect on local grids can be much larger than the global share suggests.

An example

Greenpixie's AI energy guide, citing the International Energy Agency, reports that data centres used around 485 TWh of electricity in 2025, after growing 17% in a year. Consumption from AI-focused data centres grew by 50%. The IEA expects total data centre demand to roughly double to 950 TWh by 2030, about 3% of global electricity demand.

How Greenpixie measures it

Cloud billing data does not show how much electricity a workload draws. Greenpixie works it out from the hardware behind each SKU:

• map each SKU to its processor, memory, drives and accelerators
• estimate IT electricity from published whole-server power measurements
• apply a fixed operating point, or the provider's baseline for burstable instances, as billing data states no utilisation
• multiply by the region's PUE to get total facility energy

Usage emissions are then total facility energy multiplied by the grid carbon intensity for the region and time period, on a location-based basis.