U.S. Data Centers Could Burn More Gas Than Germany and Japan Combined by 2035

The AI build is becoming a gas story.A new BloombergNEF outlook says U.S. data centers could consume about 18 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day by 2035 — enough, in the framing that followed the report, to exceed Germany and Japan combined. The same work says gas burned to make electricity for those facilities could rise by about 15 billion cubic feet a day over the next decade. That increment alone would top current consumption in every country except China, Russia, Iran, and the United States.Nine months ago BNEF had the added power-sector slice nearer 6.9 billion cubic feet a day. The new number is more than double, even after the firm assumed many announced data centers will never be built. Lead author Henry Eaton said the error bars are “fairly large” both ways. The direction of the revision is not.Data centers would be the second-biggest driver of U.S. gas demand growth after LNG exports. Power-sector gas use is projected to climb from about 36 billion cubic feet a day in 2025 to 54 billion in 2035. LNG exports add another 21 billion. Producers are already expected to raise output by 35 billion cubic feet a day this decade. BNEF says they would need roughly 11 billion more than that to cover both AI power and export plants without tightening the market.Why Gas Wins the Interconnection QueueHyperscalers want power that is on when the model is on. Gas turbines ramp. U.S. gas is abundant and, for now, cheap relative to waiting five years for a grid study. BNEF expects gas to supply about 69 percent of electricity for new grid-connected data centers in its forecast.Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have all publicized on-site gas plants that skip the queue. BNEF puts those behind-the-meter projects at 2.9 to 3.4 billion cubic feet a day by 2035 — roughly what all U.S. data centers use for gas-fired power today, grid included. That is the viral picture: a campus with its own turbines.It is not most of the volume. Grid-connected halls still account for the extra 15 billion cubic feet a day. That increment is about five times the demand growth BNEF sees from every other grid-connected sector combined through 2035. On-site plants are how a company opens on time. The grid is how the industry scales.Earlier BNEF capacity work already pointed at about 194 gigawatts of U.S. data centers by 2035 — on the order of one-fifth of national electricity, versus about 6 percent now. Chip shipments imply even more if energy were unconstrained. Energy is the constraint. Gas is the workaround.The Turbine ProblemThe United States now leads the world in gas-fired capacity under development, with a large share aimed at data centers. Texas is the epicenter. Turbine makers are sold out years forward. Developers have turned to engines, temporary units, and anything that can spin before the interconnection agreement does.That bottleneck cuts both ways. If turbines cannot arrive, some of BNEF’s gas demand does not arrive either. If they do arrive, the emissions and basis-price story arrives with them. Proposed gas plants tied to data centers have already been linked in separate reporting to a sharp rise in power-sector emissions if they run as planned. Secondary write-ups of the new outlook have put extra greenhouse gases in the range of a million metric tons a day — a figure that should be read as an illustration of scale, not a single official BNEF line item.Communities fighting data centers were already arguing about water, noise, and rates. They now have a pipeline map.What Could Break the ForecastAI demand could disappoint. A training slowdown — the one lab chiefs floated this month — would take pressure off new clusters. Efficiency gains in chips and cooling could flatten megawatts per model. Nuclear, geothermal, and delayed-but-real grid upgrades could steal share from gas after 2030.The other break is price. If data centers and LNG trains bid for the same molecules, industrial users and winter heating bills feel it. BNEF’s extra 11 billion cubic feet a day of required production is the tell that the supply response is not automatic.Eaton’s warning about wide error bars is the adult sentence in the report. The childish sentence is treating 18 billion cubic feet as a booked cargo. It is a base case in a market that has rewritten the base case twice in a year.The Policy CollisionTech companies still publish net-zero timelines. Gas on site and gas on the grid are how those timelines meet a 2027 opening date. Carbon capture on combined-cycle plants is the reconciliation some papers prefer. Capture is not what is being poured in Abilene this quarter.State fights over who pays for new generation will get louder as PJM and ERCOT load forecasts keep climbing. Federal export policy sits on the other side of the same molecule. You can favor cheap AI power or cheap LNG cargoes. A tight market will not give you both at last year’s price.The Picture in One LineBy 2035, on this forecast, American server halls drink gas like mid-sized industrial countries. The chips need electrons. The electrons, for the next decade, look mostly like methane.That is not destiny. It is what the interconnection queue and the turbine backlog are writing until something else shows up at scale.Digital8Hub will track the next BNEF revision, on-site plant commissions, and whether hyperscaler capex guidance still assumes this much fire.