US data centres could guzzle more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035
A new BloombergNEF report nearly doubles its own nine-month-old forecast, finding AI's hunger for power could add the equivalent of 12% of total US greenhouse gas emissions every day.
Key points
- BloombergNEF projects US data centres will consume roughly 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, nearly double the firm's forecast from nine months earlier.
- Grid-connected data centres alone could drive 15 billion cubic feet per day of extra natural gas demand from power plants, five times more than every other grid-connected sector combined.
- Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have each announced on-site natural gas power plants that bypass the electricity grid entirely.
- The additional daily emissions from that demand could equal roughly 12% of total US greenhouse gas output today.
- Analysts at Noreva warn that rising data-centre demand alongside growing LNG (liquefied natural gas, shipped overseas in chilled form) exports could push gas prices higher, hitting ordinary utility customers.
The AI industry's power bill is growing faster than almost anyone predicted, and ordinary people will likely feel it in ways that have nothing to do with chatbots.
A new report from energy research firm BloombergNEF, first flagged by TechCrunch AI, puts the number in stark terms. By 2035, US data centres, the giant warehouse-sized buildings full of computers that run AI and everything else online, could burn through around 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day. That's almost double what BloombergNEF itself predicted nine months ago.
For scale: Germany and Japan are two of the world's biggest gas consumers. US data centres alone are on course to outpace them both combined.
What is actually driving this?
Two separate forces are pushing demand up, and the bigger one is quieter than you'd expect.
The headline-grabbing piece is on-site power generation. Big tech companies are building their own natural gas plants right next to their data centres, cutting out the shared electricity grid. BloombergNEF estimates those private plants will burn 2.9 billion to 3.4 billion cubic feet per day by 2035, roughly equal to all data-centre gas consumption today across every source.
But that's the smaller part of the story.
Grid-connected data centres, buildings that draw power from the same network that lights your home, are expected to push electricity utilities to burn an extra 15 billion cubic feet of gas per day. Five times more demand growth than every other sector on the grid combined. We've been tracking this strain on grid infrastructure since our 10 September report "AI Data Centres Are Breaking the Power Grid, and It Is Not About Supply", and these new numbers suggest the underlying pressure is worse than the grid's wiring problems alone.
| Demand source | Est. Gas use by 2035 (cubic feet/day) |
|---|---|
| On-site data centre plants | 2.9 billion to 3.4 billion |
| Grid-connected data centres (via utilities) | ~15 billion |
| Total data centre demand | ~18 billion |
| Germany + Japan combined (today) | Less than 18 billion |
Should ordinary people be worried about their energy bills?
Possibly, yes. Today's data-centre building boom leans on natural gas prices that have stayed fairly stable in recent years. Analysts at Noreva think that stability won't hold. If data-centre demand surges at the same time LNG exports grow, prices could climb. Tech giants can likely absorb higher costs. Households paying utility bills may not find it so easy.
Then there's the climate side. Burning one cubic foot of natural gas releases the equivalent of 60 grams of carbon dioxide, counting extraction and delivery, according to the International Energy Agency. The extra gas burn from data centres would add roughly 1 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution per day, about 12% of total US greenhouse gas emissions as they stand now.
BloombergNEF's forecast does factor in that not every announced data-centre project will actually get built. Even so, the gap between where we thought we were nine months ago and where we're heading is striking.
Common questions
Does this mean AI is bad for the climate?
Not automatically, but it does mean the industry's energy footprint is much larger than most forecasts assumed even recently. The question for policymakers and utilities is whether enough of that power can shift to wind, solar or nuclear before the gas demand locks in for decades.
Will this affect my electricity or gas bill?
It could, especially if you live in a region with heavy data-centre construction. If gas prices rise because of combined data-centre and LNG export demand, utilities that burn gas to generate electricity tend to pass those costs on to customers.
