Does AI consume too much electricity? Arcep wants to take stock

Since 2020, Arcep has each year asked French digital companies to disclose their environmental figures: electricity consumed, greenhouse gas emissions, and volumes of water withdrawn. The scope has expanded over the years, from telecom operators to mobile equipment manufacturers, and then to fiber-optic cable manufacturers in the latest submission in May.The authority is now aiming a notch higher.

An open consultation, data collection scheduled for 2027

Arcep has put a draft decision out for public consultation intended to incorporate providers of generative AI services into its annual survey. The timeline calls for some patience: the data collection campaign in question is the one for 2027, with publication in 2028.

The authority has also been engaging with these providers and data center operators since the beginning of the year to define indicators that are methodologically sound (a less straightforward exercise than it appears, since what is attributable to AI has to be isolated within infrastructure that also hosts everything else).

Read also: Data centers – a law will make it easier to set them up, associations are concerned

The general idea is reminiscent of the energy label attached to washing machines: making what is not comparable comparable by requiring everyone to fill in the same boxes. The regulator does not intend to set a ceiling or penalize consumption, merely to obtain figures that it can publish.

Data centers are growing faster than the rest

The latest survey gauges the scale of the problem with 2024 data: electricity consumption by data center operators is rising by 12% in one year.Their greenhouse gas emissions, meanwhile, jumped 23% over the same period, as the electricity used became more carbon-intensive. Usage is following the same upward trend, since 48% of French people said they were using generative AI in 2025, 28 percentage points more than two years earlier, with a peak of 85% among 18–24-year-olds.

What remains is the real reason for the operation, which the authority stated bluntly in a report published in the spring. Model developers and service providers communicate too little about their actual environmental impacts, making any serious comparison impossible. Users are therefore left without the information they would need to make an informed choice. In other words, the figures circulating today essentially come from those who have an interest in presenting them in their best light.

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Source: Arcep