How much electricity do data centers use worldwide each year, in terawatt-hours?

How to get close to this number

Take a share of world electricity. Global generation is around twenty-eight thousand terawatt-hours a year, and the explanation gives data centres at roughly one and a half percent of it. That percentage of that total gives a figure in the hundreds of terawatt-hours.

The comparison in the explanation is the one that conveys it: comparable to the entire annual electricity consumption of France. Expressing an industrial load as a country's consumption is the standard way to make an energy figure judgeable, and a single sector matching a large European economy is the point.

The projection is what makes this a live issue rather than a static statistic: the total could roughly double by 2030, with AI training and inference the fastest-growing slice. The cost-of-training question on this site describes the same growth from the financial side, and the electricity figure is where that spending physically lands.