Electricity prices are surging, voters are growing angry, and the artificial intelligence industry’s data centers are increasingly a target for blame with U.S. mid-term elections on the horizon.
Residential utility bills rose 6% on average nationwide in August compared with the same period in the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The reasons for price increases are often complex and vary by region. But in at least three states with high concentrations of data centers, electric bills climbed much faster than the national average during that period. Prices, for example, surged by 13% in Virginia, 16% in Illinois and 12% in Ohio.
The tech companies and AI labs are building data centers that consume a gigawatt or more of electricity in some cases, equivalent to more than 800,000 homes, the size of a city essentially.
Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the state’s recent governor’s race in a landslide by campaigning on cost of living. Spanberger put at least part of the blame for rising electricity prices on data centers, promising to make tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share” of the escalating costs.
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