Koomey: Anyone forecasting 2035 data center power demand is making it up
John Koomey · A skeptic’s take on AI electricity load growth · Mar 6, 2025 · at 46:03
Energy researcher John Koomey discusses the validity of long-term utility and tech load forecasts.
0:00 / 0:06exact quote · 6.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So I think anyone who claims to know what's going to happen in twenty-thirty-five, the data center of electricity use, I think is just making it up.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from John Koomey
Koomey: Rebound effects from efficiency gains are typically only 10 to 20%
“Yes, the car's a little bit cheaper, and yes, people drive a little bit more, but generally, these effects tend to be kind of small. They tend to be kind of 10 to 20%.”
Koomey: OpenAI lacks an obvious path to profitability without massive growth
“Open AI right now is just a major, it's hemorrhaging cash like you can't believe, right? There's no obvious way that they become profitable without a massive increase in the demand for their services and the ability to raise the cost, and that is really unclea…”
Koomey: AI industry will pivot to massive efficiency gains under infrastructure constraints
“Between those various, ah, improvements that you can get beyond just shrinking transistors and making things closer together, there's orders of magnitude possibility for improving efficiency, and so my sense is that the, you know, the focus has been basically …”
Koomey: US data center load will double once more then level out
“It would not surprise me if You know, we saw another doubling, but I would say, you know, probably that's about it. I think that's going to level out, and then people are going to be more efficient at what they're doing based on the history”
Koomey: Data center compute grew 6x while power rose only 6% (2010-2018)
“We had about a six-fold increase in the compute output for data centers from 20 10 to 20 18, but electricity use went up a grand total of six percent over that period.”
Koomey: IEA hides data and calculations for its power forecasts
“Whereas some of the other projections, even From pretty credible organizations like the International Energy Agency, you can't actually figure out what they did. They don't release the data. They don't release the calculations in any explicit way.”