PSE: Data Centers Could Consume a Tenth of Poland's Electricity by 2040

Poland's Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne (PSE), the national transmission grid operator, has calculated how much electricity data centers being built out for artificial intelligence will consume. The conclusions from the grid development plan published in February 2026 are stark: by 2040, data centers could account for nearly 30 terawatt-hours of annual electricity consumption in Poland, a sharp jump in pressure on the national transmission network.

Where the numbers come from

The estimates come from PSE's transmission grid development plan for 2027-2036, published in February 2026. The operator's scenario treats data centers as one of the country's main new energy consumers, alongside electric vehicles and the re-electrification of industry. The Institute of Communications (Instytut Łączności) had already flagged the issue, warning that energy shortfalls could hold back AI development in Poland, but PSE's data is the first to put a concrete terawatt-hour figure on the scale of the problem.

A key caveat that market analysts stress concerns the gap between announcements and actual investment. Filing a grid connection request does not mean a data center will actually get built. The energy industry is increasingly calling for greater transparency about the status of projects, their funding sources, and planned power supply, since some of the announced capacity may never materialize.

Warsaw as the first test case

The most tangible effects are already visible in Warsaw, where distribution grid operator Stoen recorded 157 MW of connected capacity attributed to data centers at the end of 2025, with further connection agreements totaling more than 0.5 GW combined. This geographically concentrated load is deepening local grid bottlenecks and, according to experts, could delay the connection of smaller renewable energy installations if infrastructure expansion fails to keep pace with the rate of data center investors' announcements.

AI looks like a digital service, but its constraints are very physical - Sebastian Kopiej, CEO of the Commplace agency

Kopiej points out that energy and grid connection access are becoming a competitive advantage today just as important as the AI model a company wants to run. In other words, where and how quickly the next data center gets built is increasingly decided not by chip availability, but by the availability of connection capacity.

Is AI really to blame

Some context often gets left out of the debate over data center energy consumption. According to analyses cited within the IT industry, artificial intelligence itself currently accounts for only 10-15 percent of data center energy use, while traditional IT infrastructure, meaning the servers, storage, and networking that support ordinary cloud services, consumes 85-90 percent. By 2030, AI's share is expected to rise to 19-30 percent, but that would still be a minority of total consumption.

Focusing solely on AI, it's easy to overlook that it isn't the most energy-intensive part of IT infrastructure - Monica Batchelder, sustainability director at HPE

That distinction matters for grid planning in practice. Demand generated by ordinary cloud services is currently growing faster than AI itself, but it is the next generations of models, especially video generation and autonomous agents carrying out long computational tasks, that PSE and the IEA point to as the main driver of the sharp rise in demand expected over the next decade.

Where the power will come from

PSE's plan for 2027-2036 assumes that renewable energy sources will account for more than 66 percent of the energy mix by 2036, while coal's share is expected to fall to around 18 percent. Financing the transmission grid expansion needed to serve new consumers, including data centers, is projected to cost 66 billion zloty over that period. Some of those costs will ultimately be passed on, in part, to the electricity bills of all consumers connected to the national grid.

For Polish companies and local governments, this means a concrete shift in investment planning. Data center developers, tech companies scouting locations for server facilities, and distribution grid operators will need to treat access to connection capacity in the coming years as a separate, hard business condition rather than a formality. Local governments in regions with surplus capacity, for example where coal power plants are being decommissioned, could gain an edge in attracting such investments.

The scale of the global trend shows Poland is not an exception. The International Energy Agency estimates that worldwide data center energy consumption will rise from around 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 to nearly 945 terawatt-hours in 2030, more than doubling within six years. Similar, if smaller-scale, forecasts for Poland suggest that expanding the transmission grid should be treated as one of the energy priorities of the coming decade, alongside the electrification of transport and industry.