A UN agency warns AI data centers could nearly double their power use by 2030

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe is warning that electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers is on pace to nearly double by 2030, straining power grids that take far longer to expand than the facilities drawing on them. The commission’s warning cites projections that data center consumption will climb from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt-hours by 2030, reaching about 3% of global electricity demand.

Data centers can be sited and connected to the grid in as little as two years. The transmission lines and substations needed to actually supply them typically take more than a decade to build, and that gap is the core of the warning.

UNECE, not the IEA, is the one issuing the warning

The 485-to-950 terawatt-hour projection traces back to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental body that tracks global energy trends but sits outside the U.N. system entirely. The warning built on top of that data, and the call for coordinated government action, comes from the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe, one of five regional commissions that report to the U.N. Economic and Social Council and cover Europe, North America and parts of Central Asia.

UNECE prepared the warning as a paper for its own Committee on Sustainable Energy, drafted by the commission’s Task Force on Digitalization in Energy, according to a summary published by the UN Regional Information Centre. That paper also flags a demand source separate from AI: cryptocurrency mining, which it estimates already adds another 100 to 130 terawatt-hours of electricity use every year on top of the AI-driven data center growth.

An investment gap that grows even as it tries to catch up

Closing the gap between data center construction and grid capacity requires money moving on a similarly steep curve, according to UN News’s reporting on the UNECE paper. Annual grid infrastructure investment needs to rise from roughly $800 billion in 2026 to $1.8 trillion by 2050, more than double, even though the data center demand it is meant to serve is projected to nearly double by 2030 alone, decades sooner than the investment curve catches up.

That mismatched timing is why UNECE frames this as a resilience problem rather than a simple capacity shortfall. Utilities are being asked to commit tens of billions of dollars to projects with decade-long lead times, based on demand forecasts for a technology sector that has repeatedly outpaced its own growth projections. A transmission line approved today, on that math, is being sized for a 2030s AI market nobody can forecast with any real precision, using a permitting process built for a much slower-moving industry.

Sizing a grid for a demand curve that could just as easily double again after 2030 as it could plateau is a different planning problem than sizing one for population growth or electrified heating, both of which move on far more predictable, decades-long trend lines.

Ireland rewrote its connection rules, not just Dublin’s

UNECE’s examples of governments already responding include Ireland, where the commission points to connection restrictions concentrated in the Dublin region, the country’s most grid-constrained area for new large electricity users. Ireland’s Commission for Regulation of Utilities went further than a Dublin-specific freeze, though: in December 2025 it adopted a nationwide policy requiring grid operators to classify any proposed data center site as “constrained or unconstrained,” according to the CRU’s own decision document.

Under that policy, new data centers must supply matching generation or storage capacity themselves, source at least 80% of their annual electricity from new Irish renewable projects within a six-year transition window, and wait for grid operators to publish their formal connection processes by March 31, 2026. Dublin’s years of tight connection queues are what pushed Irish regulators toward that national framework in the first place.

The Netherlands has run out of room in its most-wired provinces

The Netherlands took a more geographic approach, and it has effectively run out of room to expand it. “The last Dutch provinces with available grid capacity, South Holland and North Holland, have now declared they have no room left for growth,” Stijn Grove, managing director of the Dutch Data Center Association, told Computer Weekly.

Grove said that even a government-proposed “AI factory” initiative would likely end up as a small facility, since larger operations simply cannot be placed anywhere in the country at the moment. The Dutch Ministry for Economic Affairs has announced a working group to address the infrastructure bottleneck, though it has not published a timeline for concrete fixes.

The mismatch UNECE describes is playing out in real time in a country that, unlike Ireland, has not yet settled on a national framework to replace province-by-province gridlock. Whether the Netherlands ends up with something closer to Ireland’s constrained-versus-unconstrained rulebook, or a narrower fix aimed just at Amsterdam’s immediate surroundings, is a decision UNECE’s warning does not make for national regulators.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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