AI Data Center Power Consumption vs. Cities (2026)

How much power does an AI data center use?

The largest AI data centers now being built are planned at 1 to 5 gigawatts each, and a 1 GW campus running flat out for a year would use 8.76 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. Meta's Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which Meta expanded in July 2026 "to 5 GW in compute capacity," would use 43.8 TWh a year at full power. That is 87% of the 50.1 TWh New York City drew from the grid in 2025, according to NYISO.

These are ceilings, not forecasts. Developers announce capacity, not expected consumption, and data centers rarely run at full draw. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) estimates that U.S. data centers use about 50% of their grid interconnection capacity on average. At that rate Hyperion would still use about 21.9 TWh a year, slightly more than Los Angeles's utility sold in 2025 (20.7 TWh).

What are the largest AI data centers?

Meta's Hyperion, at 5 GW, is the largest AI data center campus with a published capacity, more than twice the next largest. Amazon plans 2.4 GW of data center capacity in Northern Indiana, Microsoft says its Fairwater campus in Wisconsin will scale to 2 GW, and Talen Energy will deliver 1,920 megawatts from its Susquehanna nuclear plant to an Amazon campus next door. Vantage's Frontier campus in Texas (1.4 GW), the OpenAI–Oracle Stargate sites at Port Washington, Wisconsin (1.3 GW of forecast demand) and Abilene, Texas (1.2 GW), and Meta's Prometheus in Ohio ("1GW+") complete the list in Figure 2.

The numbers are not strictly comparable. Meta reports "compute capacity," Crusoe reports Abilene's "total power capacity," and the Port Washington figure is the local utility's demand forecast rather than the developer's own number. Most of these campuses are still under construction, and Hyperion has no published completion date.

Can a data center use more electricity than a city?

Yes. Running at full power, Hyperion would rank second among the 13 cities in Figure 1, behind only New York City. Amazon's Northern Indiana campus (21.0 TWh) would pass Los Angeles, and Microsoft's Fairwater (17.5 TWh) and the Susquehanna campus (16.8 TWh) would each use more than Austin, Memphis or Philadelphia. Even the smallest campus shown, Meta's 1 GW Prometheus, would use 8.76 TWh at full power, 1.6 times New Orleans's 2025 retail sales and just under Seattle's.

At the state level, Hyperion's full-power total would exceed the 2025 retail electricity sales of 19 states plus the District of Columbia, including Kansas, Nevada, Utah and Connecticut, according to EIA data. It would sit just below Mississippi.

How many homes can 1 gigawatt power?

About 812,000 average U.S. homes for a year, if the gigawatt runs continuously. That figure divides 8.76 TWh by the 10,791 kWh an average U.S. residential customer bought in 2022, the latest year in EIA's published FAQ. By the same math, Hyperion at full power equals about 4.1 million homes. Household use varies widely by state, from 14,774 kWh in Louisiana to 6,178 kWh in Hawaii, so local home counts will differ.

How much of U.S. electricity do data centers use?

U.S. data centers used 192 TWh in 2024, or 4.7% of the country's electricity, according to LBNL's June 2026 update. Its Reference Case projects 464 TWh in 2028 and 649 TWh in 2030, or 11.8% of forecast U.S. use, with a range of 521 to 843 TWh. The 2030 Reference Case is more than Texas, the largest state, sold to all its customers in 2025 (533 TWh).

Grid operators are seeing far more requests than that. ERCOT, which runs most of Texas's grid, was tracking about 474 GW of large loads seeking to connect as of June 2026, roughly 90% of them data centers. LBNL estimates the whole country will need about 148 GW of data center interconnection capacity by 2030, so most of those requests are unlikely to be built.

Methodology & caveats

Every campus energy value in this graphic is derived by hardware.co as planned capacity × 8,760 hours (one year at full power), the same method used by the Visual Capitalist piece that inspired it. Capacity figures come from each developer's own announcement, earnings call or SEC filing, or from the utility serving the site (WEC Energy Group for Port Washington), and they measure different things: compute or IT capacity, total power capacity, contracted supply or forecast grid demand. Meta's Prometheus is shown at 1 GW, though Meta says "1GW+". None of the developers publishes expected annual consumption.

City figures are the best primary numbers available and are not perfectly comparable. New York City is NYISO's Zone J annual energy for 2025, a grid-level load including losses. Philadelphia and Phoenix come from 2022 city greenhouse gas inventories and cover use inside city limits. The other cities are 2025 retail sales of the utility that serves them (from Form EIA-861), and those service territories can extend beyond city limits. The source article's figures for New York City (46.88 TWh) and Madison (2.80 TWh) could not be matched to a primary source and were replaced with the NYISO and EIA values shown.

State values are EIA's final 2025 all-sector retail sales. U.S. totals and projections come from LBNL's 2025 Update, which revised earlier estimates slightly down and excludes cryptocurrency mining. Homes per gigawatt uses EIA's 2022 average residential purchases. Ranks, shares, multiples and the 50%-use scenario are hardware.co calculations. Chart labels are rounded for display; tables and CSV downloads carry the exact values.