Increased demand for cloud computing, AI and digital services is likely to lead to a tripling of global electricity demand from data centres by 2030, putting pressure on energy infrastructure, a new report by GlobalData has found.
According to GlobalData’s report, Powering Data Centers Market Report: Power Consumption, Capacity, PUE and Project Pipeline Analysis and Country Ranking Forecast to 2030, data centre power consumption will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.1% between 2024 and 2030.
In 2024, the United States and China were the largest markets for data centre power consumption, accounting for 38% and 24.2% of global consumption, respectively. By the end of the decade, China is expected to surpass the US, with shares of 33.6% and 30.1%, respectively, GlobalData noted.
‘Threefold expansion’
“The global data centre installed capacity is projected to surge by 2030, delivering nearly a threefold expansion within just six years,” commented Rehaan Shiledar, power analyst at GlobalData. “China is expected to lead this growth engine, scaling from 27% in 2024 to 35% by 2030.
“While the US is projected to remain the second-largest market, currently at 42%, its share is expected to decline to 34% by 2030. Even in 2030, China and the US together account for about 69% of the market, implying that global data centre capacity will remain heavily concentrated in two geographies.”
Across the rest of the world, installed data centre capacity is projected to ‘hold steady’ at just under a third (31%) between now and the end of the decade. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to lead growth in this area, while India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Australia all have ‘sizeable project pipelines’ in place, according to GlobalData.
Hyperscalers and data centres
“The global data centre market is set to be shaped predominantly by hyperscalers, colocation and managed service providers, and enterprises, because each segment addresses a distinct and enduring set of requirements,” Shiledar added.
“Hyperscalers [such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud] will remain the principal engine of growth as AI training, inference, and cloud-native workloads require vast increments of capacity delivered with industrial speed, extreme efficiency, and tight integration across compute, storage, and networking. Colocation and service providers will expand in parallel by supplying ‘ready-to-use’ power and space, dense interconnection ecosystems, and flexible commercial structures.”
The rapid growth of data centres is likely to create challenges for electricity systems, GlobalData added, with a single hyperscale facility capable of drawing as much power as a small city.
“This growth is forcing consequential shifts across generation capacity, transmission and distribution investment, and day-to-day grid operations,” said Shiledar. Read more here.
