Our World in Data Our World in Data Browse by topic Data Latest Resources About Subscribe Donate Popular pages CO₂ Emissions Population Growth Life Expectancy Poverty Impacts of Food War & Peace Global Education Artificial Intelligence Democracy Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. Read about our mission 14,095 charts 126 topic pages 29 data explorers 506 articles 14,095 charts across 126 topics All free: open access and openly licensed New Article · 14 min readIs organic farming better for the environment than conventional farming? Organic farming often wins when we compare impacts on one unit of land, but there is no clear winner when we look at impacts per unit of food production. Hannah Ritchie Article · 5 min readA never-ending childhood of malaria How often do people in high-burden areas get malaria? Studies suggest that many children can experience five or more malaria infections a year. Hannah Ritchie From our classicsWild mammals have declined by 85% since the rise of humans, but there is a possible future where they flourish Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans. But we can turn things around by reducing the amount of land we use for agriculture. Hannah Ritchie AnnouncementWe’re looking for a writer We’re hiring a writer who can make the world’s largest problems understandable to our large Our World in Data audience. Hannah Ritchie New Article · 14 min readIs organic farming better for the environment than conventional farming? Organic farming often wins when we compare impacts on one unit of land, but there is no clear winner when we look at impacts per unit of food production. Hannah Ritchie From our classicsWild mammals have declined by 85% since the rise of humans, but there is a possible future where they flourish Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans. But we can turn things around by reducing the amount of land we use for agriculture. Hannah Ritchie Article · 5 min readA never-ending childhood of malaria How often do people in high-burden areas get malaria? Studies suggest that many children can experience five or more malaria infections a year. Hannah Ritchie AnnouncementWe’re looking for a writer We’re hiring a writer who can make the world’s largest problems understandable to our large Our World in Data audience. Hannah Ritchie Updates and announcements Data update - 6 days agoTracking the size of public sector workforces around the world Explore updated data from the World Bank’s Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators. Read more Announcement - 12 days agoHannah Ritchie’s second book, “Clearing the Air”, is out in paperback in the United Kingdom “Clearing the Air” is published in paperback on September 3, 2026. Read more Data update - 15 days agoNew data: World Development Indicators, July 2026 release Explore updated data on global development from the World Bank. Read more See all updatesSubscribe to our newsletters Subscribe to our newsletters Receive our latest work by email The OWID Brief Twice a monthStay up to date with our latest work plus curated highlights from across Our World in Data, twice a month. See example OWID Brief newsletter Data Insights Every few daysReceive our bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, every few days. See example Data Insights newsletter Subscribe By subscribing you are agreeing to the terms of our privacy policy. Follow us X Instagram Threads Facebook LinkedIn Bluesky GitHub We are a non-profit — all our work is free to use and openly licensed. Donate to support us Data Insights Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, published every few days. See all Data Insights September 12 Around 5% of electricity in the United States is used for data centers — far more than the global average Hannah Ritchie Around 1.5% of the world’s electricity was used for data centers in 2025. People are often surprised by how low this number is. While data centers are a relatively small share of global electricity demand, this is not true everywhere. You can see the differences across several world regions in the chart. The United States is home to the largest share of the world’s data centers. In 2025, they consumed around 5% of the country’s electricity. But demand is even more localized than this. There are numerous states where data centers represent more than 10% of power demand. In Virginia, it’s over a quarter. Even in Europe, this demand is very concentrated; beneath its 2% figure is Ireland, where data centers consume over 20% of electricity. This local concentration of demand — combined with the speed at which AI is progressing — puts pressure on grids, even if electricity demand is not overwhelming at the global level. Read my article on how much energy data centers and artificial intelligence use Continue reading September 10 China only just missed the income cutoff to become a high-income country this year Esteban Ortiz-Ospina In July every year, the World Bank sorts countries into income groups based on their per capita gross national income (GNI) in the previous year. In this year’s update, China was very close to entering the high-income group: its GNI per person was $14,230; just short of the World Bank’s high-income threshold of $14,375. The chart puts this in perspective. The bars show GNI per person for countries with at least 25 million people, ordered from poorest to richest. Beyond income, China is already comparable to high-income countries in many dimensions. Its spending on research and development as a share of GDP, for example, is higher than in many European countries. It’s also a global leader in several technology fields, including clean energy and artificial intelligence. But in other ways, China is closer to middle-income countries. Its productivity, measured by GDP per hour worked, for example, remains much lower than in high-income countries. Compare China against other countries across dozens of indicators in our country profile Continue reading September 8 In these nine African countries, average incomes have more than doubled since 1990 Max Roser and Pablo Arriagada Economic growth is most important for the world's poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest live on the African continent. Are Africa’s economies growing? The picture is mixed. In some countries, incomes have unfortunately declined in the last decades. This includes Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Burundi. I have written about this in my brief explainer on extreme poverty. In today’s Data Insight, I want to focus on the other side: I want to highlight the African countries that are achieving economic growth. Nine of them are shown in the chart above. In all nine countries, people’s average incomes have more than doubled since 1990. This made substantial improvements in living standards possible: the share of people in extreme poverty and the rate of child mortality declined in all nine countries. If you want to know more about the importance of growth and how it can be measured, you could read my article: What is economic growth? And why is it so important? Continue reading September 5 Five countries had more women than men in parliament in 2025 Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Arriagada Women’s representation in national politics has increased dramatically in the last century. But men still hold more parliamentary seats in almost every country. There are five exceptions: Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Rwanda. You can see this on the map. Most countries are in brown, meaning they have a higher share of men; in many countries, they make up more than 75% of the seats (shown in darker brown). Look closely enough, and you can see the five countries in green that have more women. This data comes from V-Dem and is based on parliamentary seats in 2025. It’s worth noting that members of parliament have varying levels of influence and power across countries. Explore how the share of women in parliament has changed in other countries Continue reading September 3 More Indians live in the Gulf states than in the US, UK, and Canada combined Esteban Ortiz-Ospina In 2024, around 18.5 million people born in India lived abroad. For the world’s most populous country, that’s not a lot: just over 1% of the population. This chart shows where they live, based on estimates from the UN, which compiles data from national censuses and population registers. Nearly half of all Indians living abroad are in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries — that’s more than the US, UK, and Canada combined. These figures are stocks, not flows: they record where people are from, not when they crossed a border. Pakistan is the clearest case: the two countries were one territory until 1947, and people kept moving across the new border for decades afterwards, so much of the 1.6 million there reflects migration that happened long ago. Our interactive tool shows migration patterns for every country, and how they've changed over time Continue reading September 1 Money spent on building data centers in the US has grown 5-fold since late 2022 Edouard Mathieu The United States is home to thousands of data centers. They are part of the infrastructure that powers many digital services, including email, gaming, streaming, social media, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI). As this chart shows, between 2018 and 2022, spending on building data centers in the US hovered between $500 million and $1 billion per month (when adjusted for inflation). But since late 2022, large investments in AI have led to a rapid growth in data center construction — both by expanding existing facilities and building new, larger ones. The latest figures released by the US Census Bureau estimate that $4.4 billion was spent in June 2026 alone — a 5-fold increase compared to November 2022, when ChatGPT was released by OpenAI. These figures cover privately-funded construction and represent only the money spent on building the actual facilities, including materials and construction labor. They don’t include the cost of IT hardware like servers and storage, which can represent a very large share of total investment. Explore our interactive charts on artificial intelligence Continue reading August 29 How often are people infected with malaria? Hannah Ritchie Malaria is an infectious disease that kills over 600,000 people a year. Most of them, children. Its high death toll is at least partly explained by the fact that there are so many infections every year: an estimated 260 to 310 million. I was curious to know how often people living in the worst-affected areas are infected with malaria. In the chart, you can see estimates of new cases per 100 people across high-burden countries. In recent decades, infection rates have declined but remain very high. There are around 30 new cases per 100 people each year. It would be tempting to simplify this number and say that 30% of people living in Nigeria are infected each year. But that’s probably far from reality. This is because the same people are often reinfected. When I looked at the scientific literature, I was surprised by how often. A study focused on children in Uganda found that those without preventative measures were infected around five times per year. Another found that in Burkina Faso, it was up to six times. So, the reality behind the “30 cases per 100 people” average is probably very skewed. Many — particularly children who have not built up immunity — are infected multiple times per year, while most of the population is not infected at all. Explore more data on the global burden of malaria Continue reading See all our Data Insights Explore our data Featured data from our collection of 14,095 interactive charts. See all our dataChild mortality rate Long-run estimates combining data from UN & Gapminder Child mortality rate Long-run estimates …