Three Senate Democrats said Tuesday that they are investigating the impact of data centers on consumer electricity bills amid concerns that the expansion of energy-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is driving up costs.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) pressed Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and several other tech firms about their data center buildouts and agreements with utility providers.
“Utility companies have spent billions of dollars updating the electrical grid to accommodate the unprecedented energy demands of AI data centers and appear to recoup the costs by raising residential utility bills,” they wrote in a series of letters.
“Through these utility price increases, American families bankroll the electricity costs of trillion dollar tech companies,” the senators added.
Tech companies have been pouring massive amounts of money into building out the necessary data center infrastructure for developing and using AI models, which require vast amounts of energy.
However, the senators argued that U.S. consumers are bearing the brunt of this development with rising utility bills, particularly near areas of high data center activity. They also suggested that Americans are unfairly burdened with the risks of data center investments that, in some cases, have not panned out.
“To protect consumers, data centers must pay a greater share of the costs upfront for future energy usage and updates to the electrical grid provided specifically to accommodate data centers’ energy needs,” Warren and her fellow Democrats added.
They also accused tech companies of using “hard-nosed tactics” to secure better rates from utility providers, arrangements that the senators suggested state regulators may find challenging to reject in the face of political pressure to approve large-scale development projects.
The senators pressed the firms for information about their data centers and energy usage, as well as their arrangements with local utility providers and what actions the companies have taken or plan to take to prevent costs from being passed on to consumers.
However, a recent study from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that states with increasing energy demand saw an overall decrease in prices, contrary to typical assumptions. They did note, however, that spikes in load growth can result in near-term price increases, pointing to the mid-Atlantic region, where there has been a recent buildout of data centers.
Microsoft and Meta declined to comment.
The Hill has reached out to the other five companies that received letters for comment.