US pet industry spendingU.S. data center electricity consumption
US pet industry spending and U.S. data center electricity consumption have, between 2015 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.967. Premium dog food and the power required to compute everything from search rankings to pet-insurance actuarial tables, on the same slope. The dog and the data centre are, against all reasonable expectation, on the same ledger.
US pet industry spending grew from around $60 billion in 2015 to over $136 billion by 2023, driven by pandemic pet adoption, premium and fresh food brands, and the arrival of pet insurance at scale. U.S. data center electricity consumption grew from about 60 TWh to over 170 TWh in the same window, driven by cloud migration, crypto's brief boom, and AI training. Both trends are the same decade's willingness to spend on categories that did not previously exist at scale, with compute and companion animals each becoming line items nobody can imagine cutting.
Eight years of two lines rising together can describe a country spending more on the dog and more on the servers that remember everything the dog has done. Both industries, improbably, now have lobbyists.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “US pet industry spending” vs “U.S. data center electricity consumption” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
