By Haley Zaremba - Jan 10, 2026, 2:00 PM CST
- Lawmakers are investigating whether AI companies are offloading massive energy infrastructure costs onto residential utility customers.
- Data centers are responsible for the majority of projected electricity load growth in several U.S. states, driving steep price increases.
- Existing utility rate structures and power grids were not designed for single customers with city-scale electricity demand.
For months, anger has been building in the communities that are involuntarily footing the bill for the AI boom. As data center clusters pop up around the globe to feed AI’s massive and growing computational needs, nearby communities are seeing their utility bills skyrocket, even if they the…
By Haley Zaremba - Jan 10, 2026, 2:00 PM CST
- Lawmakers are investigating whether AI companies are offloading massive energy infrastructure costs onto residential utility customers.
- Data centers are responsible for the majority of projected electricity load growth in several U.S. states, driving steep price increases.
- Existing utility rate structures and power grids were not designed for single customers with city-scale electricity demand.
For months, anger has been building in the communities that are involuntarily footing the bill for the AI boom. As data center clusters pop up around the globe to feed AI’s massive and growing computational needs, nearby communities are seeing their utility bills skyrocket, even if they themselves don’t benefit from the sector at all. And now, in the United States, the backlash against data centers’ resource consumption – and its impact on consumers’ bottom line – has spilled out of the bounds of local politics and landed in the Senate.
A consortium of U.S. senators – including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) – is opening a probe into Big Tech practices that offload the cost of operating data centers onto the communities that host them. In open letters written to seven AI companies, the senators pushed for accountability and transparency, citing a study that found “electricity prices have increased by as much as 267 percent in the past five years” in “areas located near significant data center activity.”
While the probe is being led by Democrats, there has been a rare bipartisan groundswell over the issue in the states where data centers are concentrated. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis reports that in Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, “data centers are responsible for 65% to more than 85% of projected load growth” for utilities.
Due to this intense demand growth, major utilities in these states, plus North Carolina, project that they will collectively add 32,600 MW of electrical load over the next 15 years. And it’s consumers – of energy, not necessarily of AI – who will have to pay the price for all of that additional demand. It’s estimated that Virginians can expect average electricity prices to increase by another 25 percent by 2030.
"We are witnessing a massive transfer of wealth from residential utility customers to large corporations—data centers and large utilities and their corporate parents, which profit from building additional energy infrastructure," Maryland People’s Counsel David Lapp told Business Insider earlier this year. "Utility regulation is failing to protect residential customers, contributing to an energy affordability crisis.”
And the terms behind that transfer of responsibility are extremely opaque, as is typical for the AI sector. In the Senators’ letter to AI companies, they blast these firms for operating in the shadows against public interest. The letter notes that AI firms “ask public officials to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) preventing them from sharing information with their constituents, operate through what appear to be shell companies to mask the real owner of the data center, and require that landowners sign NDAs as part of the land sale while telling them only that a ‘Fortune 100 company’ is planning an ‘industrial development’ seemingly in an attempt to hide the very existence of the data center,” senators wrote.
Not only are data centers adding undue pressure to Americans’ already considerable financial burdens, they are also competing for scarce resources in rural and agricultural economies. Data centers require huge amounts of land and considerable water sources, which could lead to conflict and issues of scarcity in certain hotspots such as drier climates and agricultural communities concerned about land competition and “environmental impacts, noise and lack of transparency.”
In many ways, the country – and the world – simply is not prepared for the scale of the AI boom, and all of the resources and regulations that it will require. There are serious concerns about whether ageing power grids can keep up with demand, and whether energy output can keep up with surging demand. Plus, the way that our systems are designed simply never saw this coming.
As the senators express in their letter, “the current, socialized model of electricity ratepaying” in which costs are shared by all grid users, “was not designed for an era where just one customer requires the same amount of electricity as some of the largest cities in America.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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Haley Zaremba
Haley Zaremba is a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. She has extensive experience writing and editing environmental features, travel pieces, local news in the…