It depends on the country and on where the data centres are located. Over a year, France has some headroom: in 2025 it exported 92 TWh more than it imported, which is 6 times the 15 TWh of RTE's high trajectory for its data centres in 2030. The difficulty arises grid by grid: in Île-de-France (the Paris region), the power requested by projects (6.5 GW) is close to the average power drawn by the whole region (7 GW). In the United States, which accounts for nearly half of world data centre consumption, the operator of a nuclear reactor aims to restart it in 2027 to supply Microsoft, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects 15 to 27 GW of gas-fired power stations on data centre sites by 2030.
Read the source article: How much electricity does AI use? Global figures and forecasts