The escalating demand for data centers, driven by Big Tech's pursuit of artificial intelligence, is significantly increasing electricity costs for ordinary consumers, who are effectively subsidizing the infrastructure for these profitable corporations.
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When I noticed my electric bill had gone up,
I started asking my neighbors, “Is your bill also going up?”
And they had no idea that this was happening.
[Host] If you live in any of these states,
your electric bill is higher this summer.
It's not because of anything you did.
You're paying more because the world's
biggest tech companies are building
so many data centers.
I do guess that a lot of the world gets
covered in data centers over time.
But I don’t know cause maybe put them in space.
Is this something where we are committed
to building out data centers across our 60 regions?
We are absolutely going to.
Big Tech’s quest for artificial intelligence is creating a tidal wave of new costs
that are about to hit all of us,
even if you live nowhere near a data center.
The big problem is that we're all subsidizing the wealthiest
corporations in the world and their pursuit of artificial intelligence.
[Energy expert] Americans’ utility bills are rising
while Big Tech’s profits are going through the roof.
[Sam] We traveled into data center country
and found a hidden wealth transfer:
everyday people covering the power costs
of the data center buildout.
Companies like Amazon and Meta
striking secret deals with utilities.
[Energy expert] It's all proprietary, it's all behind
non-disclosure agreements and blacked-out documents.
And lobbying for a system that leaves all of us
footing their bill—
unless we do something about it.
[Cassandra Lainez] So I've always paid attention to my electric bill,
mainly for environmental friendly reasons.
I wanted to make sure I'm not using too much light
and what room am I using the most light.
[Sam] Cassandra Lainez lives in northern New Jersey.
In July, she got an electric bill that caught her attention.
[Cassandra] The thing I noticed right away was
compared to the same time last year,
my bill has gone up.
But also I noticed my usage went down.
I started to pay attention to this box area,
where it describes your supply charges,
and I noticed a $29 increase on my bill.
To me, honestly, it felt almost like a slap in the face
to use less energy and then get charged more for it.
A lot of folks sometimes work two to three jobs to be able to pay their bills
and don't take the time or have the time and luxury to even look down at their bill.
I sat down with a neighbor
and I asked her about her electric bill—if it's gone up.
And she was like, “Well, where would I check that?”
She brought it out and I checked,
and her bill looks the same as mine.
It's also gone up in the supply section.
I wanted to understand why Cassandra
and her neighbors are suddenly paying so much more for electricity every month.
To figure that out, I ended up having to travel 300 miles south.
[Julie Bolthouse] This is like the Wall Street of the data center industry.
[Sam] Julie Bolthouse researches the dramatic growth
of an area of northern Virginia known as Data Center Alley.
[Julie] So there's already over 200 data centers,
that are built or approved in Loudoun County.
We have the largest data center market in the world by far.
And so there's a race to ensure that these companies
have enough space to grow out
what they hope to be the future of AI.
The demand is just off the charts.
We’re the biggest owner,
the biggest developer of data centers.
And our pipeline right now is up 25% year on year.
[Sam] Between 2021 and 2024,
the number of data centers nationwide nearly doubled.
And that's because companies like Amazon, Meta,
Microsoft, and Google
have decided to invest billions
on technology that requires an enormous amount of computing power.
What does it take to win?
For AI that means you’ve gotta have the most powerful training compute.
Training compute is kind of like the engine—
the horsepower of the engine.
We are basically all in on this.
We’re building multiple, multi-gigawatt data centers.
[Ari Peskoe] As the tech industry is currently conceiving
of artificial intelligence,
it just requires a massive amount of energy-intensive,
power-hungry computer chips.
[Sam] Ari Peskoe wrote a recent report
about how data centers are affecting energy markets.
[Ari] We've seen announcements from Meta and from OpenAI
that they intend to develop five gigawatt data center campuses.
I mean, just to, I guess, put this in perspective,
I think a gigawatt—
it’s like around the size of, like,
[Ari] These AI development companies
wanna get these gigawatt-sized facilities online.
They want many of them around the country,
and they wanna do it within the next few years.
[Sam] In 2025, the tech industry is expected to spend about
$475 billion on data centers,
up 42% since last year.
Today, data centers make up about 4%
of U.S. electricity demand.
In just the next three years, that's expected to triple.
[Tyson Slocum] The United States has never generated more electricity
in our history than we are today.
The problem is that data centers are
bursting through the envelope of energy demand,
and we're seeing record energy demand
almost entirely being driven by data centers.
[Sam] Tyson Slocum works on energy
and utility issues at Public Citizen.
And so, let's take an example in
the world's largest power market.
It's called PJM.
It covers 13 U.S. states from Illinois to Washington, D.C.—
about 65 million Americans live within its footprint.
[Sam] Many factors determine what we pay for electricity.
But to understand how data centers are making it more expensive,
it's important to know that the price that utility companies pay for power
is set in regional markets.
The biggest of those is a market known as the PJM.
They had a big, what's known as a capacity auction, last year.
Last year's capacity auction broke all records.
[David Lapp] And what happened last summer in the auction,
is the prices went up by 800%.
A massive increase in costs.
[Sam] David Lapp represents ratepayers in Maryland,
another PJM state.
He explained to me that when utilities
have to pay a higher capacity price,
they pass it on to consumers
in the form of supply charges.
According to the PJM’s Independent Monitor,
data centers were responsible for 63%
of last year's price increase.
We saw customers, with bills $900—
over $1,000.
it's unfathomable
that they are having to pay higher rates
to support wealthy corporations, building data centers.
And it's not just PJM.
We're seeing this happen across the country.
We're seeing data center loads from coast to coast.
It's affecting every energy market.
[Sam] One way to start addressing this
supply and demand problem
would be to bring new power supply to the grid.
But then, the big question is:
who's going to pay for that new infrastructure?
The way the system currently works,
we all pay for it.
So the utility business model is more than
a hundred years old and it was designed
to spread electricity service
at the beginning of the 20th century.
The basic idea is that: utility builds something
and you socialize the cost to all of the ratepayers
that have no choice but to take that utility's service.
The cost of new infrastructure
mostly shows up on another part of your electric bill,
sometimes called delivery charges.
Utility companies are allowed to set those charges
high enough to recoup every dollar
they spent building, plus a regulated rate of profit,
usually around 10%.
So this is a huge profit opportunity.
This growth in demand is a great excuse to build the sort
of infrastructure that they're very comfortable building.
If you look at sort of any of the earnings calls that these companies do,
they're touting data center growth in their region.
[Sam] To lure data centers to their service areas,
utilities have started cutting direct deals with Big Tech.
One way the utilities might attract new data center customers
is by offering them a good deal on electricity.
This is a competition between utilities to attract these data centers.
Ari and his team looked at nearly 50
regulatory proceedings across the country
about utility rates for data centers.
What they found is that the deals between tech companies
and utilities are typically hidden from the public,
and there's good reason to believe
we should be concerned about that.
The concern with these deals is that the data center may be underpaying.
That it's not covering the costs that the utility is incurring
to provide service to that data center.
And there's gonna be a shortfall for the utility
and it's gonna look to the rest of us,
to ordinary ratepayers, to make up that difference.
And so our rates will go up in order to finance
a sweetheart deal for a data center.
One recent example is happening right now in Louisiana,
with a data center being developed by Meta.
[Sam] Last year, a utility company in Louisiana
proposed to spend $3 billion on a new power plant
to meet electricity demand from a Meta data center.
The full terms of its deal with Meta are secret.
But redacted regulatory filings have revealed
that the public is on the hook for Meta’s power plant.
[Ari] Meta has signed a 15-year deal and it only obligates them to
pay for about half of that $3 to $4 billion
of infrastructure, which means that there's a big risk that everyone else
in Louisiana will get stuck with the rest of that bill.
I believe deeply in building personal superintelligence for everyone,
and at Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required
and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people.
Meta saw an opportunity:
negotiate a massive data center deal
without the public having any input.
And to this day, there is still massive amounts of detail
about that Meta AI complex
that the people of Louisiana have no information about.
In Virginia, the utility company Dominion Energy
has proposed to build six new power plants
to meet data center demand,
the first at a cost of $4.5 billion.
According to one estimate, only 30% of that will be paid for
by the customer class that includes data centers.
[Commercial] At Dominion Energy, we know power is personal.
[Sam] Residential customers will pay about half the cost,
despite the fact that residential demand for electricity
has flatlined.
Dominion projects that average residential electric bills
will more than double to $315 a month
in the next 15 years, primarily due to data centers.
We should not be having to pay the bill for the infrastructure
that is supporting private companies
that are making a ton of money off of this infrastructure.
They're not building AI just because it's fun to build AI,
they're building AI because it's making them money.
[Ari] The right way to do it is to make sure that the data centers
pay for every penny of this infrastructure.
[Sam] In Maryland this year, ratepayers and advocates
came together to try to address this problem
and passed a state bill that
creates a new customer class for data centers.
So what this legislation does—
and it's an important step forward—
is it says, these data centers don't fit within any of those customer classes,
and we need a new customer class for large loads.
Once you have a ratepayer class, then you can actually
specifically charge that class for
infrastructure that's being built for them,
and you can isolate them from other ratepayers.
Isolating these data centers is an important first step,
and a number of states are taking that step.
[Sam] The Oregon Legislature also passed a law this spring
that isolates data centers from other ratepayers.
But taking that step in other states will not be easy
because Big Tech companies have other plans.
A group called the Data Center Coalition,
is opposing these efforts at state capitals across the country.
It's a membership organization made up of Amazon, Meta,
Google, Microsoft and dozens of other data center operators.
And it claims that its members are already paying their fair share for power.
[David] We hear the data centers say, “We welcome paying those costs,”
but we're not seeing them advocate for reforms where they really take on those costs.
[Tyson] The Data Center Coalition is corporate public relations, right?
They're not paying their fair share.
The numbers don't lie.
[Sam] In the last few years, the Data Center Coalition
has raised millions of dollars from its corporate members.
In Virginia last year,
its PAC gave over $2 million to state legislators.
The investment paid off this spring,
when state leaders voted down several bills
that would have regulated data centers.
Big Tech is literally the wealthiest, most profitable industry in the world.
They have the capacity to pull out their pocketbooks
and cover their costs associated with this data center expansion.
Instead, the American people and small businesses
that aren't data centers are covering their costs.
[Sam] In the next 15 years, data centers are expected to add an additional
$160 billion to grid costs in the US.
If policymakers fail to change anything,
by one estimate, electricity rates for average households
will spike by as much as 70%.
I think if the tech companies are the ones that want to do this,
are the ones that are in competition with each other,
want to create this open market and have this business,
I think they're the ones that need to pay for these infrastructures,
you know, not myself.
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