Miller has announced a new paradigm in the gas market

Alexey Belogoryev, Research and Development Director of the Institute for Energy and Finance, commented to RBC on the importance of the data center and AI market explosive development for long-term global demand for natural gas and nuclear energy.

Gazprom sees the outlines of a new paradigm in the global gas market, in which Russia will play a significant role, Alexey Miller said. According to him, digitalization, data centers and AI are leading to a change in the gas architecture.

AI is, of course, a serious challenge for the energy transition, and in some cases, such as in Russia, additional growth in gas generation may be the answer, Alexei Belogoryev says. However, he warns, current plans in the leading countries of the AI market indicate that mainly low—carbon generation sources will be used for its energy supply.

"Therefore, gas is one of the options in solving the problem of AI energy supply, but still far from the main one," the expert notes.

In 2024, global data center energy consumption amounted to 508 billion kWh, of which AI services accounted for about 17%, Belogoryev cites data. At the same time, according to average estimates, by 2030 this figure will more than triple to 1,600 billion kWh, and the share of AI in the use of data centers will steadily grow. However, it is worth extrapolating this growth to gas generation with great caution, the expert believes.

"Government regulators in foreign countries have also begun to pay close attention to this segment of energy consumption, and no one, except perhaps [the US President] Donald Trump, is going to exempt it from the requirements to reduce its carbon footprint. Therefore, for example, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are now investing not at all in gas, but in nuclear power, primarily in small modular reactors. If we talk about "traditional" types of generation (that is, without renewable energy), nuclear power plants look like the main beneficiary of the explosive growth of AI," he concludes.