Reports of unprecedented and “explosive” growth in electricity demand from data centers—facilities that host websites, store data, stream media, mine cryptocurrency, and train artificial intelligence models—have appeared in many major news outlets. These headlines encapsulate two widely expressed concerns: • First, that rising energy demand from data centers could further overburden aging power infrastructure. • Second, that this new source of demand could jeopardize efforts to mitigate climate change. Focusing on empirical data, this report explores the accuracy of narratives that data centers are behind exploding demand for energy. It finds no evidence that this is true on the national level in recent years—indeed, the data show no rapid growth of energy demand—but we did find regional variations. It also shows that utility forecasts in 2023 were much higher than forecasts from prior years, demonstrating that utilities expect demand for electricity to grow in the years ahead. This report also explains the key drivers of load growth for data centers, focusing on growth in computing services and improvements in efficiency. Both these drivers are subject to deep uncertainty. The report puts data centers’ projected growth into perspective, comparing it to load growth in a high electrification scenario. This comparison shows that even for an extremely high projection of data center electricity use, data centers are likely to be only one of several important contributors to load growth in the years ahead.