BloombergNEF Forecasts US Data Centers to Consume 20% of Electricity by 2035

The American power grid is about to get stress-tested like never before. BloombergNEF now projects that US data centers will consume roughly 20% of the nation’s electricity by 2035, up from about 5.9% today. That’s not a typo. One-fifth of all electricity in the country, sucked up by humming rows of servers.

To put that in perspective, BNEF’s latest forecast pegs US data center power demand at 106 GW by 2035. That figure represents a 36% increase from the firm’s own April 2025 projection of 78 GW.

Right now, US data centers operate at around 40 GW of capacity, accounting for roughly 3.5% to 4% of total national electricity demand. BNEF’s base case scenario puts that share at approximately 8.6% by 2035.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has modeled high-growth scenarios where data center electricity consumption could reach 10% to 20% of US demand by 2035. The key variable pushing toward the upper end of that range: cryptocurrency mining combined with AI-driven compute.

Nearly one-quarter of new data center projects in the pipeline exceed 500 MW in capacity.

Companies like Core Scientific and Riot Platforms have been strategically partnering with major tech firms, including AWS and Google, to retrofit their mining facilities for AI workloads. Bitcoin miners have secured approximately 6 GW of power capacity, with pipelines extending to 12 GW by 2027.

Some analysts estimate that 20% of Bitcoin miners’ capacity may pivot toward AI workloads by the end of 2027.

Texas provides the clearest example of this transition. The state’s grid operator, ERCOT, has seen data centers account for roughly 90% of large-load demand applications. Many of the sites that were originally built or planned for crypto mining are now being repurposed for AI-driven workloads.

Core Scientific’s stock trajectory tells that story. The company emerged from bankruptcy and partnered with CoreWeave, an AI cloud computing firm, to convert mining capacity into AI hosting.