Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) fired off a letter on Tuesday to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and several major data center developers to investigate the impact they’re having on Americans’ utility bills.
The move comes as rising electricity rates became an increasingly hot-button issue in the US, which has far more data centers than any other country in the world and has seen waves of local opposition to these facilities as a result. Power demand is suddenly increasing after more than a decade without much change, due in large part to new data centers that underpin the generative AI boom. Utilities wind up shifting costs to consumers as they build out new power plants and transmission lines to meet data center demand, the lawmakers contend.
“American families bankroll the electricity costs of trillion-dollar tech companies”
“Through these utility price increases, American families bankroll the electricity costs of trillion-dollar tech companies,” the letter says. “Data centers’ energy use should not come at the expense of energy availability and affordability for American families.”
Data centers account for more than 4 percent of the nation’s electricity use, a figure that the US Department of Energy expects to reach up to 12 percent by 2028. AI increases the amount of power data centers need to complete more complex tasks. And even if the AI bubble pops, other ratepayers could be stuck with the bill for new energy projects that break ground in the meantime.
It’s difficult to suss out how much of the burden residential consumers will shoulder, in part because powerful tech companies have brokered deals with utilities behind closed doors and asked local officials to sign NDAs that limit how much information is made public. In many instances, data center developers don’t even disclose who their tenants will be.
To try to lift the veil, the three senators have asked companies to respond to a long list of questions in their letter by January 12th of next year. The topics range from data centers’ electricity consumption and companies’ plans for expansion to their lobbying efforts when it comes to local regulation. The senators sent the letter to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, as well as data center developers CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix.
Microsoft and Meta declined to comment on the record to The Verge. Google and the three data center developers didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge.
Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski said in an email that “Amazon pays for its own electricity costs—and we challenge anyone claiming otherwise to show their data.” Levandowski pointed to a report Amazon funded that says that its data centers generate more in revenue for utilities than it costs for utilities to serve those facilities.
Levandowski also cited a December report from researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that found that climbing electricity demand can actually shrink average retail electricity prices by spreading out costs among more customers. That study notes, however, that this trend tends to benefit large, nonresidential customers. The researchers based this on data between 2019 and 2024 and cautioned that it’s “unclear” whether the same pattern would play out moving forward if electricity demand continues to rise more steeply.