The major technology companies are consuming ever greater amounts of energy as they ramp up the use of AI and storage capacity.

A team at BestBrokers analysed the annual electricity consumption of the ten largest tech firms by market cap that publicly disclose such information and compared their power usage to that of entire countries, based on the latest US Energy Information Administration data.

The analysis revealed that a total of 129 countries and territories each consume less power per year than Google alone, which used 25,307GWh in its last fiscal year.

Samsung consumed 29,956GWh of electricity across its global business sites in its last fiscal year. That’s roughly the same as the entire energy consumption of Ireland (5.2 million people) or Serbia (6.7 million people), each using around 31,000GWh per year.

TSMC, largest semiconductor maker in the world, has a power consumption that surpasses Azerbaijan's yearly total of 24,000GWh, a nation of 10.7 million people, using 24,775GWh in 2023.

Microsoft’s power usage of 23,568GWh last year outpaced the entire electricity consumption of countries Iceland or Croatia and Facebook's parent company Meta wasn’t far behind, consuming 15,325GWh in 2023.

Other heavy users include Tencent, Apple, NVIDIA, ASML and Broadcom.

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