A staff member checks equipment at a high performance computing company in Horinger, Hohhot City, north China's Inner Mongolia, Nov. 28, 2023. (Xinhua/Li Zhipeng)
BEIJING, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- The global electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will exhibit a trend of rapid growth in the near future, then stabilize due to advanced computing technologies and improved energy consumption efficiency, according to a report issued on Tuesday at the 2025 Global Energy Interconnection Conference in Beijing.
The Global Electricity Development and Transition Report 2025 was issued by the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization (GEIDCO), the organizer of the conference.
According to the report, AI applications have spurred significant growth in the electricity consumption of global data centers. Since 2010, the capacity of accelerated computing servers to undertake AI tasks has grown at a pace four times of that of all servers over the past decade.
In 2024, the electricity consumption of global data centers rose to approximately 415 billion kilowatt-hours, accounting for about 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption and representing a fourfold increase from 2005. Between 2020 and 2024, the electricity consumption of accelerated computing servers increased about 2.4 times, with an average annual growth rate of 36 percent, per the report.
It notes that the scale of electricity consumption driven by AI is influenced by three factors: software algorithms, computing hardware, and the electricity consumption efficiency of data centers. For data centers, AI-based energy management systems can reduce the energy consumption required to cool systems. Currently, advanced data center energy-management systems can save about 15 percent of the energy consumption of cooling systems.
As intelligent applications penetrate various scenarios, the substitution effect of future intelligent computing on general-purpose scenarios will gradually emerge, with its proportion of power demand increasing steadily and becoming the primary segment for computing and electricity consumption in data centers, according to the report. AI power demand will also exhibit a rapid linear growth trend in the near future.
However, influenced by progress in advanced computing technologies and energy consumption efficiency, the overall electricity demand of AI is expected to follow a logarithmic growth pattern -- a pattern where growth is very rapid in the initial stages, then gradually slows over time and eventually levels off.
AI is poised to become an emerging driver of electricity consumption growth in certain regions and will impose higher requirements on power supply, although its impact on the world's total electricity consumption will remain insignificant, per the report.
The conference, which opened on Monday and will close on Wednesday, has attracted nearly 1,000 participants from over 100 countries and international organizations, including the United Nations.
GEIDCO is a non-profit international organization that is headquartered in Beijing and dedicated to promoting sustainable energy development worldwide.
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