Plugged In: the energy news podcast The data centre boom
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Jun 26, 2025 Tor Björn Minde, head of the ICE Datacenter Unit at RISE, and Liam Newcombe, Senior VP of Product at Greenscale, dive into the booming data center industry. They discuss how the rise of AI and cloud migration is driving energy consumption, predicting a quadrupling of demand by 2030. The conversation highlights challenges in sustainability, the critical role of data centers in daily life, and the geographical dynamics of where these centers are built. They also touch on innovative strategies to meet growing energy needs efficiently.
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Scale Of European Data Centre Growth
- European data centres currently consume about 9–10 GW, similar to ~10 large nuclear plants running continuously.
- Analysts project this could triple to ~35 GW by 2030, raising consumption from ~55–80 TWh to 150+ TWh.
AI Is A Catalyst, Not The Whole Story
- AI is a major catalyst but sits on a decade-long wave of cloud migration, IoT and edge computing demand.
- GDPR and low-latency needs also drive distributed European data-centre placement.
Data Centres As Essential Infrastructure
- Data centres power everyday digital life from phones to cloud services and are essential infrastructure.
- Global estimate is roughly 500 TWh consumed by data-centre operations today.