Dive Brief:
- Two scenarios forecasting U.S. data center electricity demand by 2030 differ by 42 GW, highlighting growing uncertainty about the scale of the buildout even as it accelerates, Bloomberg NEF analysts said Wednesday.
- A base case modeled on U.S. data center development BNEF considers likely to materialize shows demand from the sector of 118 GW in 2030 and 194 GW by 2035, an upward revision of 52% and 83%, respectively, from the firm’s previous outlook, which it published in December. A second forecast developed around expected AI chip deliveries finds there could be 207 GW of U.S. data center demand by 2033.
- The report highlights the difficulties in modeling the new demand. “BNEF underestimated installed data-center capacity in 2025,” the research provider says in a new report. Installed capacity topped 47 GW by the end of last year, 16% higher than BNEF’s forecast.
Dive Insight:
“We track data centers across the U.S. and in the last year, we've added about 100 GW of project capacity,” BloombergNEF Senior Associate Nathalie Limandibhratha said Wednesday in a discussion of the estimates. “It's not only the number of data centers and new developers that are flooding the market, but it's also the size of these data centers.”
How big is the gap between the two forecasts? That 42 GW is more than four times the peak load of New York City, analysts noted for context, and it grows to 63 GW by 2033. Driving the uncertainty are the growing size of data centers, power availability and the extent to which developers get more efficient in their building, they said.
When BNEF was forecasting data center demand a year ago, a 1-GW project was considered large, Limandibhratha said. “In our pipeline now, we have over 70 projects that are a gigawatt in size, and even some projects that are multiple gigawatts, up to 10 GW, which is really skewing the project pipeline, and kind of ballooning and leading to the upwards revision as we get more data on how the market is evolving.”
U.S. data center demand in 2025 was almost 50 GW, she said, and it’s on pace to more than double over five years.
“It's quite significant and rapid growth,” she said.
Almost all U.S. regions ended 2025 with more data center capacity than BNEF had anticipated, according to the report, with Texas accounting for the “largest difference between forecast and actual build.”
BNEF estimated 7.4 GW of data center capacity in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas footprint by the end of 2025. Actual demand is estimated at 8.9 GW, according to the report. The PJM Interconnection had the most demand of all U.S. regions, with about 16 GW of data center demand at the end of last year.
BNEF’s base outlook is relatively conservative, its analysts said, sitting in the middle of third-party estimates. Among those 2030 estimates of installed data center capacity there is about a 100-GW range, Limandibhratha said. S&P, for instance, expects 2030 data center demand to top 180 GW.
A recent report from Bank of America suggests the U.S. could need more than 230 GW of new generating capacity over the next five years. Regulated utilities are expected to add only about 93 GW, calling into question just how the demand will be met. Data centers could add roughly 125 GW of U.S. electric load over the period, BofA analysts said.
