Planned data center construction shows no signs of fading, with new additions to require 2.7x — nearly triple — the sector’s current demand for electricity over the next decade, according to a new report from BloombergNEF.
By 2035, data centers will draw 106 gigawatts, up sharply from the 40 gigawatts they use today. Much of that growth will occur in more rural areas as facilities grow in size and as sites near urban areas become scarce, BloombergNEF said.
Driving part of the growth is the sheer scale of planned data centers. Today, only 10% of data centers draw more than 50 megawatts of electricity, but over the next decade, the average new facility will draw well over 100 megawatts. The biggest sites help skew the data: Nearly a quarter will be larger than 500 megawatts, and a few will exceed 1 gigawatts.
Planned data centers are significantly larger than those currently in operation.Image Credits:BloombergNEF
At the same time, the utilization rate for all data centers is expected to grow from 59% to 69% as AI training and inference grows to nearly 40% of total data center compute.
In some ways, the findings in the new report aren’t surprising. AI companies have been racing to build more powerful data centers, helping to drive global investment in the facilities up to $580 billion this year. That’s more than the world spends finding new supplies of oil.
Still, the new report shows just how quickly the landscape is changing. It is a sharp revision upwards from a document the group published in April. The upswing was driven by a surge in new projects that have been announced since then. “With an average seven-year timeline for projects to come online, developments in earlier stages affect the tail end of our forecast the most,” the new report said.
Early stage projects have more than doubled between early 2024 and early 2025, though those are distinct from projects that have been committed or are currently under construction.
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Much of that new capacity is being planned for Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and New Jersey. They lie within a region known to industry experts at the PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission organization that’s tasked with operating the electrical grid in those states and others, including Delaware, West Virginia, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Texas’s Ercot grid will see a large number of additions, too.
The report arrives as the PJM Interconnection is under scrutiny from its independent monitor, Monitoring Analytics. The group filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) saying that PJM has the authority to authorize new data center connections only when its grid has adequate capacity.
“As part of its obligation to maintain reliability, PJM has the authority to require large new data center loads to wait to be added to the system until the loads can be served reliably,” Monitoring Analytics wrote. “PJM has the authority to create a load queue.”
What’s more, data centers are responsible for today’s high electricity prices within the region, the organization said.
“PJM’s failure to clarify and enforce its existing rules and to protect reliable and affordable service in PJM is unjust and unreasonable,” it said.
