Data centers consumed 460 TWh globally in 2025 per IEA tracking

The Economist leader dismisses concerns over data center expansion as moral panic. Primary evidence from the International Energy Agency's 2025 Electricity report records 460 TWh consumption, up 12% year-over-year. Grid operators in Virginia and Texas reported interconnection queues exceeding 100 GW, with 70% tied to hyperscale projects rather than general compute. Efficiency metrics from MLPerf Inference v4.1 show per-token energy falling 28% for Llama-3 class models between 2024 and 2025 releases.

NVIDIA's 10-K filing for fiscal 2025 lists 3.2 million Blackwell GPUs shipped, each drawing 1000 W TDP under sustained load. This deployment pace exceeds the 2023-2024 combined total by 40%. Regional transmission studies from ERCOT and PJM document that new gas peakers and renewables contracted specifically for data centers now total 28 GW, with capacity factors above 85% required to meet 99.999% uptime SLAs.

Operational implication is straightforward: power purchase agreements signed in 2025 lock in 15-year terms at $45-60/MWh for co-located generation. Utilities report these contracts de-risking renewable buildout while increasing average residential rates 2-4% in affected balancing authorities. No evidence supports claims of systemic grid collapse; instead, localized congestion and permitting delays dominate.

Next milestone is the 2026 EIA Electric Power Monthly release, which will confirm whether AI-driven load growth remains under 8% of total US demand or breaches the 10% threshold.