U.S. data centers could become a dominant driver of national natural gas demand, using roughly 18 billion cubic feet per day by 2035 and potentially outpacing the combined consumption of Germany and Japan. That is the central finding of a new BloombergNEF forecast, which upgraded its outlook substantially from a prediction made nine months earlier while accounting for the fact that not all announced projects will be completed.
The report identifies data centers as the second-strongest source of natural gas demand growth, behind liquefied natural gas exports. BloombergNEF separates the load between facilities that generate power onsite and those that rely on the grid. Onsite gas-fired plants tied to major cloud operators, including Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, are expected to consume between 2.9 billion and 3.4 billion cubic feet per day by 2035, roughly matching total current data center consumption across all uses, including gas used to feed the wider power grid.
Most of the projected increase, however, would come from grid-connected data centers. By the middle of the next decade, BloombergNEF projects an additional 15 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas consumption in the power sector driven by these facilities, five times the growth expected from all other grid-connected sectors combined through 2035. BloombergNEF warns that such demand could nudge natural gas prices higher.
Analysts at Noreva say the combined effect of the data center buildout and rising LNG exports could push prices substantially higher, a shift that corporate budgets might absorb but utility ratepayers could struggle to bear. The climate implications are substantial: the International Energy Agency’s metric equates burning one cubic foot of natural gas with 60 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, including upstream impacts. At that rate, the additional data center demand would produce about 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every day, roughly 12% of current U.S. emissions.
If the forecast materializes, the energy footprint of AI and cloud infrastructure will intensify pressure on energy markets, utilities, and climate policy. The BloombergNEF projection frames a clear trade-off for planners and regulators: accommodate rapid compute growth with new fossil-fuel supply, or accelerate alternative strategies to limit fossil demand from an expanding digital economy.
