AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.

Data centers are proliferating in Virginia and a blind man in Baltimore is suddenly contending with sharply higher power bills. The Maryland city is well over an hour’s drive from the northern Virginia region known as Data Center Alley. But Kevin Stanley, a 57-year-old who survives on disability payments, says his energy bills are about 80% higher than they were about three years ago. “They’re going up and up,” he said. “You wonder, ‘What is your breaking point?’” It’s an increasingly dramatic ripple effect of the AI boom as energy-hungry data centers send power costs to records in much of the US, pulling everyday households into paying for the digital economy. The power needs of the massive complexes are rapidly driving up electricity bills — piling onto the rising prices for food, housing and other essentials already straining consumers. That’s starting to have economic and political reverberations across the country as utilities and local officials wrestle over how to divvy up the costs. Yet those same facilities are a linchpin of US leadership in the global AI race.

WATCH NOW