U.S. electricity consumption set a new record high last year and is on track for new all-time highs this year and next, as the AI boom has ended America’s decade of stagnant power use.
Rising electrification rates are partly responsible for the higher power demand, but the AI boom and the data centers that support it are the key drivers of growing electricity demand and will remain so over the next few years.
As power demand grows, generation is also increasing to record highs, with natural gas remaining the mainstay of the U.S. power mix. But renewable energy generation and capacity installations are also rising and replacing more and more of the coal-fired power supply, despite the pro-coal and anti-renewables policies of the Trump Administration.
Total U.S. electricity supply hit a record high of 2,234 terawatt hours (TWh) in the first half of 2026, up by 3% from a year earlier, according to data by clean energy think tank Ember analyzed by Reuters columnist Gavin Maguire.
This growth was mostly due to the data centers, as “data center load is emerging as the dominant driver of long-term U.S. electricity growth,” as the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its annual outlook earlier this year.
After hitting a record 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours of total electricity consumption in 2025, the U.S. will see this use further jump to 4,269 billion kWh this year, and 4,399 billion kWh next year, according to EIA’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for July.
What’s more notable than the expected fresh records in consumption is the EIA’s forecast that sales to customers in the commercial sector this year will top the sales to residential customers, for the first time ever, and will remain the biggest power-consuming sector in 2027 ahead of the residential and industrial sectors.
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This projection by the EIA shouldn’t be surprising as the commercial sector with the data center load has been leading U.S. power demand growth for a few years now.
And it is expected to lead consumption growth for years to come, posing difficult questions for U.S. policy makers about the price residential consumers will pay and the readiness (or not) of the power grids to support the surge in demand this decade after nearly a decade of zero electricity growth.
U.S. data center power demand is forecast to more than double to 66 gigawatts (GW) in 2027 from 31 GW in 2025, driven by an accelerating buildout of AI infrastructure, Goldman Sachs Commodities Research said in a report in May.
