A UN report has warned that global data centres could consume 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity by 2030, nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. According to the report published by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), these three countries are collectively home to more than 650 million people. In 2025, global data centres consumed an estimated 448 terawatt-hours of electricity, which would have made them the world's 11th-largest electricity consumer, behind France and ahead of Saudi Arabia. The report has been updated with the latest data from Business Standard, confirming the projected consumption levels and their significant impact on global energy infrastructure.
The report revealed that the associated water footprint of data centres would equal the minimum annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of Sub-Saharan Africa, while the land footprint linked to their electricity use would exceed 14,500 square kilometres, roughly twice the size of the Jakarta metropolitan area. AI data centres consume millions of litres of water for cooling systems that help prevent servers and high-performance processors from overheating during intensive computing operations. This has raised growing concerns over water use and resource stress, particularly in drought-prone and water-scarce regions where large data centres can place additional pressure on already strained supplies.
The report highlighted significant variations in AI's energy consumption depending on the type of task performed. A typical conversational AI query is around 200 times more energy-intensive than basic text classification, while generating a single AI image can require nearly 1,450 times more energy. Meanwhile, a short AI-generated video can consume as much electricity as 200,000 spam classifications. The researchers noted that factors such as model choice, prompt length, output format and video resolution can significantly alter the environmental footprint of AI systems, even though many of these decisions are determined by default settings that users rarely see.
The environmental burdens of AI infrastructure are being unevenly distributed across the world, with Ireland data centres accounting for 21% of total metered electricity consumption in 2023. The national grid operator has paused new approvals around Dublin until 2028 due to mounting pressure on the power system. In Mexico and Uruguay, expanding data centre infrastructure has intensified concerns over water use during prolonged droughts. The report warns that AI infrastructure could generate up to 2.5 million tonnes of electronic waste annually by 2030, much of it likely to be processed in low-income countries with limited environmental safeguards.
