HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — As outrage spreads overenergy-hungry data centers, politicians from President Donald Trump to local lawmakers have found rare bipartisan agreement over insisting that tech companies — and not regular people — must foot the bill for the exorbitant amount of electricity required for artificial intelligence.
But that might be where the agreement ends.
The price of powering data centers has become deeply intertwined with concerns over the cost of living, a dominant issue in the upcoming midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and governors’ offices.
Some efforts to address the challenge may be coming too late, with energy costs on the rise. And even though tech giants are pledging to pay their “fair share,” there’s little consensus on what that means.
“‘Fair share’ is a pretty squishy term, and so it’s something that the industry likes to say because ‘fair’ can mean different things to different people,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.
It’s a shift from last year, whenstates worked to woomassive data center projects and Trump directed his administration to do everything it could to get them electricity. Now there’s a backlash astowns fight data centerprojects and some utilities’ electricity bills have risen quickly.
Anger over the issuehas already had electoral consequences, with Democrats ousting two Republicans from Georgia’s utility regulatory commission in November.
“Voters are already connecting the experience of these facilities with their electricity costs and they’re going to increasingly want to know how government is going to navigate that,” said Christopher Borick, a pollster and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion.
Data centers are sprouting across the U.S., as tech giants scramble to meet worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products that require large amounts of computing power to train and operate.
The buildings look like giant warehouses, some dwarfing the footprints of factories and stadiums. Someneed more powerthan a small city, more than any utility has ever supplied to a single user,setting off a raceto build more power plants.
Source: Fast Company
