How much power do Europe’s data centres use?

Europe’s data centres used about 70 TWh of electricity in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency estimate the European Commission quotes. Estimates vary widely: the Commission’s Joint Research Centre put EU consumption at 45 to 65 TWh in 2022, 1.8% to 2.6% of EU electricity, while ICIS, cited by Ember, puts Europe at 96 TWh in 2024. By 2030 the same estimate rises to about 115 TWh, as AI pushes demand for computing up.

The striking thing is how little of this is measured. The Commission itself says the EU lacks precise data. When operators first reported under the Energy Efficiency Directive, 776 sites in 18 countries declared 16.7 TWh: less than a quarter of the estimated total.

Ireland is the outlier

Only a handful of countries publish a national figure. Ireland’s is the most dramatic. In 2025, data centres used 7,663 GWh, or 23% of all metered electricity in the country. In 2015 it was 5%. That is more than all of Ireland’s urban households combined, which used 18%, according to the same CSO release.

The growth has slowed, from four points in 2022 to one point in 2025. Meanwhile the rules have tightened. Ireland’s energy regulator now requires new sites above 10 MVA to provide dispatchable generation or storage on site or nearby, and to match 80% of their yearly demand with new Irish renewables within six years of connection.

23

IE

4.6

NL

4

DE

1–1.5

FR

n/a

AT

n/a

BE

n/a

BG

n/a

CY

n/a

CZ

n/a

DK

n/a

EE

n/a

EL

n/a

ES

n/a

FI

n/a

HR

n/a

HU

n/a

IT

n/a

LT

n/a

LU

n/a

LV

n/a

MT

n/a

PL

n/a

PT

n/a

RO

n/a

SE

n/a

SI

n/a

SK

Source: CSO Ireland (2025); CBS (2024); Ember, citing ICIS (Germany, 2024); SDES (2024). Definitions differ by country.

Bigger totals, smaller shares

In absolute terms Germany uses the most: 20 TWh in 2024, by the industry association Bitkom’s estimate, against 12 TWh in 2015. Because Germany uses so much electricity overall, that is only about 4% of national demand, according to estimates by the analysts ICIS cited by Ember. In the Netherlands they used 5.1 TWh, 4.6% of the country’s electricity, up from 1.5% in 2017. In France, sites using more than 1 GWh a year consumed 4.3 TWh, about 1 to 1.5%.

Malta: no number at all

Malta publishes no figure for its data centres. The closest the National Statistics Office gets is the whole information and communication sector, which used 55.2 GWh in 2024, 3.3% of non-residential smart-meter consumption. That covers telecoms, publishers and software firms as well as servers, so it can’t be read as a data-centre number.

Rules are catching up

On 21 September the Commission adopted a rating scheme for data centres above 500 kW, now under scrutiny by Parliament and Council, scoring them on heat reuse, clean energy and how flexibly they use the grid. The first labels are expected in 2027. Until then, the honest answer to how much power Europe’s data centres use is: about 70 TWh, give or take, and nobody knows exactly.