Like Moore’s Law, energy efficiency for data centers began to run out of steam by the 2010s. After substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, the energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much between 2018 and 2024. It didn’t stop the PR spin about how Big Tech is so efficient and getting more efficient every year.

You’re using as much energy as a family home. Yes, but we’re efficient. You’re using as much energy as a small town. Yes, but we’re efficient. You’re using as much energy as a big city. Yes, but we’re efficient. You’re using as much energy as France. Yes, but we’re efficient. You’re using as much energy as a continent. Yes, but we’re efficient. You’re using all the electricity left on earth. Yes, but we’re efficient.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta more than doubled their energy demand between 2017 and 2021. There was talk of an exponential doubling again between 2022 and 2026. Driven by AI, emissions figures from data centers were expected to double or treble again by 2030. Were AI-driven data centers adding a Germany or a Japan-worth of electricity every couple of years? Was one data center using as much electricity as three million people? Did new data centers come with nuclear power plants attached?

“Something unusual is happening in America,” The New York Times reported in 2024. “Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.” In little old Ireland, by the early 2020s, data centers were consuming over 20% of Irish electricity, more than every city, town and village in the country put together. Politicians were dancing jigs and celebrating how Ireland was truly at the top table in the Growth Death Cult.

Data centers often have an even bigger impact on electricity use in a region than the actual electricity they use because of a practice called “air bookings”, where Big Tech locks up future electrical capacity just in case it needs it. This blocks development in the local area. In Skåne, Sweden, for example, “Microsoft booked so much electricity from the grid in the Malmö region that the local Swedish bread company Pågen could no longer build a bread baking factory in the area and had to expand elsewhere,” Julia Velkova, assistant professor at the University of Helsinki, stated. Digital is physical.

All this surge in electricity demand meant that coal plants were being kept in service longer, and oil, gas and nuclear providers were booming. Even the data centers that claimed to use wind, solar or hydro energy had “backup” diesel generators, and who knows how often they are actually running them? Some were also questioning how Big Tech was monopolizing wind, solar, etc., that could instead have been used to help homes and local businesses move away from fossil fuels. “For a lot of individuals and politicians, the fact that we use energy from newly constructed wind parks for the benefit of hyper-scale data centers feels out of balance,” explained Julia Krauwer, a technology analyst at Dutch bank ABN Amro.