US Data Centers to Burn More Gas Than Most Nations by 2035

U.S. data centers are projected to consume more natural gas than nearly every country on Earth by 2035, driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. A new forecast from BloombergNEF indicates that gas used to generate electricity for American data centers will increase by 15 billion cubic feet per day over the next decade, a figure that has more than doubled from a previous estimate of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day issued in December. This projected consumption would exceed the current natural gas usage of every nation except China, Russia, Iran, and the United States itself, according to Energy Information Administration figures cited in the analysis. Natural gas is expected to supply 69 percent of the power for new grid-connected data centers, favored for its abundance, relatively low cost, and the ability of gas plants to ramp up and down quickly to meet the constant power demands of server farms. The surge in demand is part of a massive infrastructure buildout. A separate analysis by Moody's Ratings estimates the U.S.