The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has released projections in its Annual Energy Outlook 2026 (AEO2026) indicating that electricity consumption by data center servers will grow substantially across the commercial building stock through mid-century, with standalone data center facilities driving the largest share of that increase.
According to the AEO2026 scenarios, server electricity consumption alone is projected to land between 446 billion kilowatthours (BkWh) and 818 BkWh annually by 2050. The upper boundary of this range corresponds to the agency's High Electricity Demand case, which assumes accelerated growth in both server power density and total installed hardware stock. Under this scenario, standalone data centers — categorized within the EIA's 'other buildings' segment — are projected to consume 581 BkWh from servers alone.
In 2025, data center servers were estimated to account for approximately 7% of total commercial sector electricity consumption nationwide. By 2050, that figure is projected to climb to between 22% and 33% of commercial building electricity use across all modeled cases — a fourfold to fivefold increase in sectoral share.
The findings carry significant implications for power system planners, transmission developers, and generation investors. The concentration of large-scale load growth in discrete geographic clusters — characteristic of hyperscale and colocation data center campuses — presents particular challenges for local grid capacity, voltage regulation, and interconnection queue management.
Utility integrated resource plans and regional transmission organization (RTO) long-term studies will need to incorporate these demand trajectories to avoid underbuilding generation and transmission capacity. The projections also reinforce growing interest in co-located generation solutions, including behind-the-meter natural gas, nuclear small modular reactors, and dedicated renewable energy procurement strategies tailored to data center operators.
