The landscape of the digital world has been fundamentally re-engineered by Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence, Data Centers and the Global Race for Electricity By Tonynetone | Engineering & Knowledge We once built television transmitters on mountains and hills to broadcast signals across entire countries. Today, a different kind of infrastructure is spreading across the planet: enormous data centers designed to power artificial intelligence. They are the industrial engines of the digital revolution. Behind every AI conversation, generated image, video or complex calculation, processors work inside buildings that require electricity, cooling, water and increasingly sophisticated connections to national power grids. The cloud is not really in the sky. It has a physical address, and that address is becoming strategically important for the world’s major economies. THE GLOBAL ENERGY RACE According to the International Energy Agency, data centers consumed approximately 485 TWh of electricity worldwide in 2025. The IEA estimates that consumption could approach 950 TWh...