The boom in artificial intelligence and cloud services will cause the electricity requirements of German data centers to rise dramatically in the coming years. According to surveys by the digital association Bitkom, data centers and smaller IT installations in this country will require around 23 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in the current year 2026. This roughly corresponds to the entire annual electricity consumption of around 6.5 million households - more than all private households in the whole of North Rhine-Westphalia or Bavaria.
An increase to 35 to 38 billion kilowatt hours is expected by 2030, and by 2035 the demand could even rise to 56 to 70 billion kilowatt hours. At the same time, the industry is sounding the alarm: a lack of network capacity and lengthy approval procedures threaten to become a bottleneck for the digital location.
»The AI competition is also a competition for computing power. Anyone who falls behind in infrastructure will quickly lose touch with AI," said Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst on the sidelines of the Federal Government's digital summit. In order to keep up with international comparisons, the association called for targeted relief in electricity prices, for example through a reduction in electricity tax or an industrial electricity price for data centers, as well as faster planning procedures.
According to the association, power supply bottlenecks are now the dominant obstacle to new projects. Around 80 percent of the operators and industry experts surveyed rated the limited network connection capacities as the biggest challenge in a current study by the Borderstep Institute.
Kilian Wagner, division manager for sustainable digital infrastructures at Bitkom, emphasized that you basically don't have a choice as to whether these data centers are built - but only where: "Companies will not put their digital transformation on hold, and we as a private population will not use fewer digital services just because we don't have enough data centers in Germany. Then we will simply become more dependent and the data centers will be located abroad.«
The main driver of this development is the boom in generative and industrial AI applications. While around 20 percent of the total German data center capacity will be used for AI and high-performance computing in 2026, this share is expected to rise to 55 percent by 2035. In terms of absolute connected load, this means an almost eight-fold increase from today's 670 megawatts to around 5,300 megawatts. At the same time, investments in German data centers will climb to a record level of 23.5 billion euros in 2026 – an increase of 57 percent compared to the previous year.
Despite the rapidly growing demand, Bitkom points to significant progress in efficiency: energy consumption is increasing at a disproportionately lower rate than the actual computing power. Modern servers now work up to three times as energy-efficiently as systems from 2021. The association was cautious about fears about excessive water consumption by modern systems. Two thirds (65 percent) of the data centers in Germany had very low water consumption of a maximum of 0.1 liters per kilowatt hour. A significant water requirement arises primarily from evaporative cooling, which is only used by around a third of the systems in this country.
