U.S. data centers could require an additional 15 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035, a BloombergNEF projection that would make their incremental demand alone larger than the current total gas consumption of nearly every country in the world.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
America’s artificial intelligence buildout is rapidly becoming an energy story as well as a technology story, with new projections showing data centers could transform the nation’s natural gas market during the next decade.
Natural gas burned to generate electricity for U.S. data centers is projected to increase by approximately 15 billion cubic feet per day through 2035, according to BloombergNEF, even after accounting for the possibility that many announced data center projects will never reach completion.
That represents a dramatic revision from forecasts issued less than a year ago.
BloombergNEF estimated in December that data centers would add approximately 6.9 billion cubic feet per day of gas demand. Its latest outlook has more than doubled that figure as artificial intelligence companies and cloud-computing providers announce increasingly large power-intensive facilities.
The scale becomes clearer when compared with entire countries.
The projected 15 billion cubic feet per day of additional consumption would be greater than the current total natural gas use of every nation except the United States, China, Russia and Iran, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, a comparison also highlighted as the enormous scale of future computing demand becomes clearer across the energy discussion.
Natural gas is expected to emerge as the principal fuel supporting much of that growth.
BloombergNEF projects gas will supply 69% of the electricity needed by new grid-connected data centers. U.S. power-sector gas consumption is expected to climb from approximately 36 billion cubic feet per day in 2025 to 54 billion cubic feet per day in 2035, according to reporting on the firm’s latest forecast.
The attraction is partly practical. The United States has enormous natural gas resources, and gas-fired generating plants can provide around-the-clock electricity while adjusting their output as grid conditions change — characteristics that are valuable to data centers operating continuously.
But the expected demand increase could alter the economics of U.S. gas production.
“In short, the resource base and producer response are sufficient, but the mix would shift toward higher-cost dry-gas drilling, supporting moderately higher gas and electricity prices than a high-oil-price, high-associated-gas world,” Stuart Turley, president and CEO of the Sandstone Group and host of the Energy News Beat podcast, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Natural gas reaches the market through two broad production pathways. Some wells are drilled specifically for gas, while enormous volumes are produced as a byproduct of oil drilling, particularly in the Permian Basin.
When oil production is strong, that associated gas can provide relatively inexpensive additional supply. If oil prices weaken enough to slow drilling, however, producers may increasingly have to drill wells specifically targeting natural gas to satisfy growing electricity and export demand.
Turley said a sustained decline in oil below roughly $70 per barrel could significantly slow new Permian drilling, reducing future associated-gas growth.
The possibility matters because data centers will not be the only major new customers competing for U.S. gas.
New liquefied natural gas export facilities along the Gulf Coast are projected to become the largest source of additional U.S. natural gas demand through 2035, with the electricity sector ranking second. BloombergNEF expects LNG exports to add roughly 21 billion cubic feet per day of demand during the period.
U.S. producers are currently projected to increase output by approximately 35 billion cubic feet per day between 2025 and 2035. Meeting the combined forecast for domestic and export demand, however, could require roughly another 11 billion cubic feet per day beyond that projected increase.
“If there is money to make, the great U.S. oil and gas producers can get it done,” Turley said.
The challenge extends beyond obtaining enough fuel.
Data center electricity consumption is rising so quickly in some areas that grid operators are being forced to reconsider assumptions developed during decades of comparatively slow demand growth.
PJM Interconnection, which operates the country’s largest regional electricity market across 13 states and the District of Columbia, has identified data centers as a principal driver of sharply higher demand forecasts.
The grid operator said in May that the system has entered a fundamentally different environment characterized by rapid large-load growth, accelerating retirements of existing power plants and lengthy delays in constructing replacement generation.
PJM estimates that building a new natural gas plant now requires at least four years under optimistic conditions, reflecting turbine and transformer supply constraints, permitting requirements, interconnection delays and increasingly large project sizes.
The region is effectively moving away from an era in which utilities managed surplus generating capacity and toward one in which they must plan around increasing scarcity.
PJM projects its summer peak electricity demand could rise by approximately 82 gigawatts over the next 15 years, reaching roughly 239 gigawatts. Data centers already represent more than 7% of electricity use in PJM territory, and their largely continuous operating patterns create unusually persistent demand.
The rising cost and availability of power have consequently become central issues surrounding new data center construction, including concerns about the effect of rapidly expanding facilities on residential electricity bills and transmission expenses.
A transmission project designed partly to accommodate Northern Virginia’s huge concentration of data centers has nearly doubled in estimated cost, illustrating how expenses can extend well beyond the generating plants themselves.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation is raising similar concerns nationally.
NERC has identified rapid growth from data centers and other large computational loads as an emerging reliability challenge, warning that demand is expanding quickly while the operating characteristics of some new facilities are not yet fully understood.
Its 2026 Summer Reliability Assessment found that data centers and other large loads continue to push electricity-demand forecasts higher across much of North America. NERC has also documented incidents in which large concentrations of power-electronic loads suddenly reduced consumption during grid disturbances, demonstrating that data centers can affect grid stability in ways that extend beyond simply consuming large amounts of electricity.
The expansion is already influencing regional electricity markets.
Data center load growth has become a major factor in PJM’s tightening supply-demand balance and elevated capacity prices as utilities attempt to secure enough future generation to serve rapidly expanding demand.
Those pressures are arriving while the construction boom continues.
Data center construction spending increased 57% from a year earlier in July as technology companies continued pouring capital into facilities required to train and operate artificial intelligence models.
The speed of that investment is one reason long-term gas forecasts remain unusually uncertain. BloombergNEF’s projections already assume a substantial portion of proposed projects will never be completed, yet the estimated natural gas requirement has still more than doubled since December. BloombergNEF gas analyst Henry Eaton said the projection carries “fairly large” error bars in both directions because of uncertainty surrounding the scale and timing of AI development.
How much of the planned infrastructure actually gets built will determine whether the projected demand materializes.
But even forecasts that discount announced projects now point toward an enormous structural shift in U.S. electricity consumption.
Natural gas demand from data centers alone could rise by 15 billion cubic feet every day by 2035. The overall power sector could consume roughly 54 billion cubic feet per day, while LNG terminals simultaneously compete for tens of billions more.
Meeting that demand would require not only more gas production but additional pipelines, power plants, transmission lines and grid infrastructure — much of which takes years to permit and construct.
The AI race, in other words, is increasingly becoming a race to secure physical energy.
And if BloombergNEF’s latest projection comes close to reality, the computing facilities powering that race will eventually require an additional volume of American natural gas larger than the amount consumed today by almost any entire country.
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