US data centers could consume more natural gas than Germany and Japan combined by 2035

U.S. data centers are on track to become a much bigger natural gas customer than most people would expect. BloombergNEF now says they could use about 18 billion cubic feet a day by 2035, which would put them ahead of Germany and Japan combined. That forecast is nearly twice what the firm saw just nine months ago.

The reason is simple: the AI buildout keeps pulling in more power, and not all of the projects announced now will actually get built, so the researchers trimmed for that. Even so, the numbers are still huge. BloombergNEF says data centers will be the second-strongest driver of natural gas demand growth over the next decade, behind only LNG exports.

Some of the loudest recent announcements have been about companies building power plants next to their own facilities so they can skip the grid. Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have all talked about that approach. BloombergNEF thinks those onsite setups will burn between 2.9 billion and 3.4 billion cubic feet of gas a day by 2035, which is already about what all data centers consume today when you include gas used for grid power.

But that may still be only the opening act. By the middle of the next decade, grid-connected data centers are expected to add another 15 billion cubic feet a day of demand from the power sector. BloombergNEF says that would be five times more growth than all other grid-connected sectors combined. If that happens, the era of cheap, stable gas that much of today’s buildout depends on starts to look shaky.

And the climate math is ugly. The International Energy Agency says burning one cubic foot of natural gas releases the equivalent of 60 grams of carbon dioxide when extraction, processing and distribution are included. BloombergNEF says the extra data center demand would add 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every day, about 12% of total U.S. emissions today.