As the ongoing AI boom shifts to the top gear, a base model from Bloomberg NEF analysts anticipates the United States’ 2030 data center demand to reach about 118 GW.
“As potential demand and data center sizes both grow, so does the complexity in forecasting,” said BloombergNEF (BNEF) Senior Associate Nathalie Limandibhratha.
The analysts, while making the prediction, used two scenarios. The experiment, however, resulted in the two models differing by 42 GW in terms of estimating the US data center electricity demand by 2030. As per the BloombergNEF, the divergence only shows growing uncertainty about the scale of the data center buildout even as the trend accelerates.
A base case modeled on US data center development BNEF considers likely to materialise showed demand from the sector of 118 GW in 2030 and 194 GW by 2035, an upward revision of 52% and 83%, respectively, from the firm’s previous outlook, published in December 2025. A second forecast developed around expected AI chip deliveries found there could be 207 GW of data center demand by 2033.
“The report highlights the difficulties in modeling the new demand. BNEF underestimated installed data-center capacity in 2025. Installed capacity topped 47 GW by the end of last year, 16% higher than BNEF’s forecast,” the agency said, while publishing its report.
“We track data centers across the US, and in the last year, we’ve added about 100 GW of project capacity. It’s not only the number of data centers and new developers that are flooding the market, but it’s also the size of these data centers,” Limandibhratha said.
That 42 GW difference, as per the BNEF analysts, is more than four times the peak load of New York City, and the tally, by 2033, will grow to 63 GW.
“Driving the uncertainty are the growing size of data centers, power availability, and the extent to which developers get more efficient in their building,” BNEF said.
“When BNEF was forecasting data center demand a year ago, a 1-GW project was considered large. In our pipeline now, we have over 70 projects that are a gigawatt in size, and even some projects that are multiple gigawatts, up to 10 GW, which is really skewing the project pipeline, and kind of ballooning and leading to the upwards revision as we get more data on how the market is evolving,” Limandibhratha remarked.
US data center demand in 2025 was almost 50 GW, she said, and it’s on pace to more than double over five years.
“It’s quite significant and rapid growth,” the senior analyst noted.
“Almost all US regions ended 2025 with more data center capacity than BNEF had anticipated, with Texas accounting for the largest difference between forecast and actual build,” the agency observed.
BNEF estimated 7.4 GW of data center capacity in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas footprint by the 2025 end. Actual demand, as per the report, has now been revised to 8.9 GW. With about 16 GW of data center demand, the PJM Interconnection, out of all the American regions, had the highest power requirement in 2025.
BNEF’s base outlook is relatively conservative, its analysts said.
“Among those 2030 estimates of installed data center capacity, there is about a 100-GW range,” Limandibhratha concluded.