AI’s energy use already represents as much as 20 percent of global data-center power demand, research published Thursday in the journal Joule shows. According to his research, worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year. Overall, the IEA predicted that data center electricity consumption will grow to more than 900 TWh by the end of the decade. But there’s still a lot of unknowns about the share that AI, specifically, takes up in that current configuration of electricity use by data centers. Data centers power a variety of services—like hosting cloud services and providing online infrastructure—that aren’t necessarily linked to the energy-intensive activities of AI.