Key terminologies

Key Findings of the report

Over the next 5 to 6 years, we forecast substantial demand growth in the global data center market.

Currently, as of Quarter 1, of 2025, we estimate the global market demand for data centers is approximately 57 gigawatts, comprised of 58% cloud workloads, 31% traditional workloads, 11% AI workloads (including both training and inference).

By 2027, overall data center market demand growing by 50 % to 86GW with AI growing to 27% and cloud dropping to 50% and traditional workloads falling to 23%.

Asia Pacific and North America have the most data center power and square footage online today.
Asia Pacific has built the most incremental data center capacity over the past 10 years.
Data centers in the highest utilisation or peak North American markets are operating at higher utilisation rates relative to peak markets in Asia.
Asia Pacific supply growth has been outpacing demand growth relative to the trend in North America, where demand has been relatively stronger.

We estimate that there will be approximately 131 GW of data center capacity online by the end of 2030, that is 762 million square feet of data center capacity - an implied 6 years combined annual growth rate of 14%.

The electric grid would require significant investment, not solely related to data centers but the rise in power demand does further accelerate the need for grid upgrades and grid expansion.
Roughly $720 billion of grid spend through 2030.
High voltage transmission is needed to supply regions where data centers are being built with sufficient power to distribute.

Wind and solar could serve roughly 80% of a data center's power demand if paired with storage.
Baseload generation is needed to meet 24/7 demand.

Nuclear is the preferred option to step in as the baseload generation, but given both scarcity of existing unregulated nuclear plants and the difficulty of building a new one, natural gas as the more realistic option for most data centers.

We suggest a 160% increase in data center power demand by 2030 vs 2023 levels.
Data centers adding a 0.3%CAGR to overall global power demand.
Data center power demand moves from 1% to 2% of overall global power demand to 3% to 4% by 2030.
This decade 40% of the data center power increase will be met with renewables, we assume the modest nuclear capacity increase by the end of the decade targeted for data centers.

This leads to expected global emissions increase of 215 to 220 million tons, equivalent to 0.65 of global energy emissions.

Over the last year, we have seen strong contracting by hyperscalers or cloud computing companies for larger scale nuclear (amazon and microsoft) and small modular reactor nuclear (google and amazon).