America's Data Centers Could Consume as Much Power as a Large Country by 2035

U.S. data centers will roughly double their power consumption by 2035, from 35 gigawatts (the output of several large power plants) to 78 gigawatts, mostly driven by artificial intelligence. This puts them on track to consume electricity at a scale comparable to entire nations. The Trump administration is speeding up construction of new data centers as a security priority, but faster building does not solve the underlying problem: the infrastructure supplying power may not exist to support them.