Your electricity bill is rising. Naturally, you’re mad about it and looking around at who to blame. But it’s not a who, it’s a what — and the recent AI-driven data center construction spree is at least partly the reason why.

Copious data centers have sprung up across the United States, nearly doubling in number between 2021 and 2024, with no end in sight to their rapid spread. According to consulting firm McKinsey & Company, companies are projected to spend $1.6 trillion on data center hardware in the US by 2030.

It’s not just the existing facilities that are creating heftier bills; even data centers that have yet to be built are driving up power prices today.

These imposing, flat-walled, near-windowless buildings are filled with processors, hard drives, and memory chips that devour electrons. Today, some of the biggest tech companies in the world are now racing each other to secure more computing facilities and the energy to power them as they scramble to dominate the AI sector. BloombergNEF, an energy research firm, estimates that data centers will consume more than double their current share of electricity by 2035, accounting for nearly 9 percent of all US electricity demand. The US Department of Energy last year projected that data centers could devour upward of 12 percent of the country’s total electricity production as soon as 2028.

Key Takeaways

• Household electricity bills are climbing across the US, partly because of the explosion of power-hungry data centers.
• Tech companies are scrambling to lock in more electricity for their planned computing facilities, even ones that might never get built.
• That rush for energy is already driving up today’s power and infrastructure costs.
• Maryland’s consumer advocate says it’s time for grid operators to step in and stop this kind of energy speculation before it hits customers even harder.

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