How Much Electricity Does the Internet Actually Consume?

We tend to think of the internet as something invisible: you open a website, and the page simply appears on your screen. You watch a video — and it just plays. You send a photo — and within seconds, it appears on another smartphone.

But behind every one of these actions is a huge physical infrastructure: data centers, servers, routers, mobile base stations, fiber-optic networks, and cooling systems.

And all of it consumes electricity.

So, how much energy are we talking about?

According to the European Commission, in 2022, data centers and data transmission networks together accounted for approximately 2–2.5% of global electricity consumption. At the same time, internet traffic increased roughly fivefold between 2015 and 2022.

Data centers alone consumed around 415 TWh of electricity in 2024, equivalent to approximately 1.5% of global electricity consumption.

To put that into perspective: we are not talking about the electricity used by a few large server rooms. We are talking about an amount comparable to the energy consumption of entire countries.

But the most interesting question is not the number — it is where all that electricity goes.

In a data center, servers are not the only things consuming power.

Some electricity is used for data storage, some for networking equipment, and a significant amount can go toward cooling the infrastructure.

According to the IEA, networking equipment inside data centers can account for up to 5% of their electricity consumption, while cooling systems can range from around 7% in highly efficient facilities to more than 30% in less efficient ones.

So when you watch a video on YouTube, electricity is needed for much more than simply “sending the video.” Servers have to run, data has to be stored and transmitted, and the equipment has to be kept cool.

What happens when we simply watch a video?

Video is one of the most data-intensive types of online content.

When you watch a movie, the data travels through an entire chain:

data center → network → telecom operator → home router or mobile network → your smartphone, laptop, or TV.

And equipment is consuming energy at every stage.

But there is an interesting paradox here.

Internet traffic is growing much faster than the amount of energy consumed by networks. Between 2015 and 2022, global internet traffic grew by roughly 24% per year, while the energy consumption of data centers and networks increased much more slowly.

The reason is simple: technology is becoming more efficient.

In other words, transmitting 1 GB of data today requires less energy than it did several years ago.

Mobile internet has its own energy cost

According to the IEA, global data transmission networks consumed approximately 260–360 TWh of electricity in 2022, accounting for around 1–1.5% of global electricity consumption.

Roughly two-thirds of this amount was attributed to mobile networks.

Interestingly, mobile traffic continues to grow rapidly, but telecom operators are not increasing their electricity consumption at the same rate.

For example, according to the IEA, network traffic among GSMA operators increased by approximately 31% in 2021, while their total electricity consumption grew by only around 5%.

In other words: the internet is getting bigger, but each gigabyte of data is gradually becoming “cheaper” in terms of energy.

How much electricity does a single data center consume?

This is where the numbers get particularly interesting.

A large conventional data center can have a power capacity of around 10–25 MW.

Large hyperscale data centers can exceed 100 MW. The IEA notes that a data center with a power capacity of around 100 MW can consume as much electricity in a year as approximately 100,000 households.

In other words, one large data center can effectively have the energy footprint of a small city.

And that number is expected to grow

According to the IEA’s base-case forecast, global electricity consumption by data centers could increase from approximately 415 TWh in 2024 to 945 TWh by 2030.

That means more than doubling in less than six years.

And it is not simply because people are spending more time online.

The amount of data is growing, cloud services are expanding, online gaming and video streaming continue to develop, and businesses are increasingly relying on digital infrastructure.

The most interesting part: the internet does not actually “live in the cloud”

We often say:

“Save it to the cloud.”

But there is no magical cloud.

Your photos, messages, videos, and documents are physically stored on servers inside real buildings. Those servers take up space, consume electricity, generate heat, and require cooling.

So the next time you upload a photo to cloud storage, remember: it is literally being stored on a real computer somewhere on the planet.

What happens next?

The paradox of the internet is that the amount of data keeps growing, while technology is simultaneously becoming more energy-efficient.

Over the past several years, the world has learned how to transmit significantly more information without increasing electricity consumption at the same rate.

But the absolute numbers are still rising.

That means the future of the internet is no longer just about speed and storage capacity.

It is also about one increasingly important question:

How much electricity does it take to keep the entire digital world running?

And perhaps, in a few years, the question “Where is your file stored?” will be almost as interesting as “How much electricity does it take to store it?”