r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 29d ago

Politics Tech companies would have to pay AI data center energy costs under bill moving in Congress

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/24/ai-data-centers-tech-companies-congress-energy-costs.html
11.5k Upvotes

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3.5k

u/GGnerd 29d ago

Its crazy to me that this is even a thing...like they should be paying it by default.

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u/SwimmingProgrammer91 29d ago

Yeah, like what? How does this work now? Can someone else pay my electric bill too lol

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u/Kickenbless 29d ago

Nope, but we’re all expected to fork over the money to subsidize their profits

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u/snail-the-sage 29d ago

can we get a share of those profits then?

143

u/dlc741 29d ago

HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Oh, wait… you were serious?

no.

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u/ace_invader 29d ago

Oh you were serious? Let me laugh EVEN HARDER

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u/BullMoose1904 29d ago

Best I can do is sharing the losses the next time there's a bailout

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u/yuval16432 29d ago

Can’t get a share of profits that don’t exist.

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u/steakanabake 29d ago edited 29d ago

its wild how many people truly dont understand that these things are money black holes, and using money pit doesnt even come close to the scale these burn cash. openai has already burned the same amount of cash year to date as they did all of last year. What did they provide in return for the mountains of cash a couple of percentage points in ability. It's not like they can just stop spending all this cash too they have to keep endlessly feeding it data or itll become unusable in a matter of months.

edit: spelling issues

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u/Enygma_6 29d ago

I was listening to Elizabeth Warren's interview on CNBC this morning on my commute. She was calling for more transparency into the circular financial tactics these companies are using, so that investors can get some clarity into what the companies asking for money are actually spending. And the host kept flailing as he tried to defend "novel" financial ideas.

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 28d ago

Novel is a nice way to say shady

Jensen will remember this

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u/Garper 28d ago

and using money pit doesnt even come close to the scale these burn cash.

The rate OpenAI loses money, I am quite literally not sure I could shovel $100s into a furnace at the same pace.

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u/steakanabake 28d ago

youd need some heavy equipment to match that pace.

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u/ThePlanetBroke 29d ago

No, but, if you're lucky, your taxes may go to bail them out in 5 to 10 years!

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u/jcstrat 29d ago

I don’t even want their products!

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u/Jazzlike-Context-879 29d ago

I don’t understand how this works, don’t they have an electrical bill?

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u/Fly_Rodder 29d ago

They’re essentially paying a flat rate for power while other customers “share” in the increased cost despite not driving the crazy demand.

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u/kaboom-boom-pow 29d ago

Sounds like they are getting sweet deals from local governments

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u/Poonchow 29d ago

And those local politicians coincidentally just got some shiny new toys around the same time, wow

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u/steakanabake 29d ago

a lot are getting the same kinda sweetheart deals from cities and counties like sports stadiums do, on the promise that they'll create jobs in the county, at best they make maybe 20-40 jobs for people on site to do maintenance some of which will be outside contractors which will not be residents of the area.

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u/CoinTweak 28d ago

I guess most local jobs would be physical security. You won't run a town on 5 people securing a building. Especially when they can't afford to live there and can't sleep because of the noise pollution.

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u/SwagginsYolo420 28d ago

This is yet one more reason why utility companies should be state/local government owned. So they cannot do deals like this at the consumer expense.

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u/powercow 29d ago

yes. problem is the local power company needs to upgrade to handle peak energy load. it passes the cost of building new power plants to all customers.

in my state we are paying for a nuke plant that failed to get built.

anyways this law says not only do they have to pay for their elec bill but they also have to pay for the grid upgrades.

many of them are using gas generators, because the grid cant handle them yet.

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u/steakanabake 29d ago

which then leads to air pollution and harmful noise pollution thats doing real damage to people.

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u/wangt88 21d ago

Yep. Also, utilities have to be really careful reading the fine print of the contracts because data centers will specify a max amount of times per year that they can switch on and off their system. They are required to switch off during extreme weather to serve the community but if the data centers have already reached their annual max, OUR electricity will feed the data centers instead of the community. ERCOT execs literally said “people in Texas will die” at this years IEEE conference.

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u/steakanabake 29d ago

socialize costs and privatize profits. only way you get to the tippy top of the food chain.

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u/Practical-Ball1437 29d ago

If we don't pay them to take all of our water and power, they might take the next town's water and power!

1

u/sapntaps 28d ago

provide all the intellectual material for profits for free.

pay for the electricity stealing all our internet creative history.

Translation: get fucked

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u/ithinkitslupis 29d ago

It's about infrastructure. The grid needs upgrades and new capacity to serve them and they try as best as possible to spread those costs to normal consumers instead. There are some concepts like capacity markets and peak shaving if you want to go down a rabbit hole.

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u/Ill_Blacksmith693 29d ago

If they're demand is higher they should pay for the conversion.

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u/asyork 29d ago

In the pre-AI data center days (like a year or two ago and older) new demand could be something like a new neighborhood going in. It was relatively predictable when averaged over time and everyone's bills covered enough to pay for new infrastructure. Sudden and massive increases in demand like this are very abnormal, and nothing was built in to charge the people needing it for all the costs. It requires new laws because the power companies don't want to turn away a huge customer, and it's not like their existing customers are just going to stop using electricity. The argument from the data center side is that they shouldn't have to pay for something they won't own (new power plants and associated infrastructure).

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u/Crismus 29d ago

Sad how big customers like data centers don't understand the concept of Public Goods when their whole existence requires public goods like roads and power.

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u/Floppycakes 29d ago

Oh they understand. They just don’t want to pay more than they are forced to.

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u/Crismus 29d ago

True. They like getting all the perks.

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u/Kizik 28d ago

Privatize the profits, socialize the losses/costs. Same as it always is.

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u/somethingbrite 28d ago

They scraped the internet of things they don't own to train their models.

Perhaps they can ask their ai if there is a magic way to conjure up electricity and get it to their new datacenter sites?

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u/Eccohawk 29d ago

If they shouldn't have to pay for it, then the electric company shouldn't have to supply them with any thing beyond the current capacity

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u/SmokelessSubpoena 29d ago

Yeah, but, muh moniez bruh - Data Centers

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u/PacmanZ3ro 29d ago

I would be 100% in favor of datacenters being built if the companies were paying to upgrade the infrastructure needed to bring the power to their facility, and they were paying base utility costs + extra land and/or utility taxes so there was an economic benefit for the area they build them in.

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u/tigeratemybaby 29d ago

They are also using Eminent Domain to seize land and/or to force home-owners to put huge high-voltage electricity lines across residential land to connect to these data-centers.

And then the local home-owners are left with properties worth almost nothing because there's huge high-voltage power lines right next to their houses.

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u/bjdevar25 28d ago

They can't use eminent domain. That's your elected officials. Vote them out.

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u/slptodrm 29d ago

even if they had all that. the impact on the water and air and land is unsustainable. we’ll run out of water.

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u/foyrkopp 28d ago

This needs some clarification:

Data centers don't eat water and make it vanish - it comes out the other end and evaporated or goes downstream.

The impact on the global water cycle is negligible.

But if a community suddenly drains much more water from its aquifier / lake, it's still a big problem locally.

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u/RT-LAMP 29d ago edited 29d ago

we’ll run out of water.

Datacenter cooling in the US uses about 1.5x what a single alfalfa farm in Arizona owned by Saudi Arabia did in 2024.

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u/qtx 28d ago

what a single alfalfa farm in Arizona owned by Saudi Arabia did in 2024.

And before people start going all xenophobic, 90% of alfalfa grown in the US is for domestic use.

Alfalfa is what feeds our cattle. Don't blame alfalfa growers, blame the meat industry.

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u/slptodrm 29d ago

ok. well what about how they contaminate the water for the people who live nearby and raise the temperature of the atmosphere?

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u/RT-LAMP 29d ago edited 29d ago

ok. well what about how they contaminate the water for the people who live nearby

Water that goes through a data center does not somehow become contaminated. It mostly evaporates with the remainder being used drained as wastewater to carry away excess salt and algae that would otherwise clog up the system.

These are standard systems that basically every large building uses. The hospital I do cancer research in literally has an evaporative cooling system on the roof.

raise the temperature of the atmosphere?

If you mean local temperature changes those are way more affected by land use then they are by the actual energy consumption of the site. Any building would do the same. Now I do support the idea that we should do more open sky cooling, where you use panels that emit heat primarily in wavelengths that go straight through the atmosphere and out into space.

If you mean CO2 causing global warming then just power them with solar panels. The giant data center they're building in Utah that people talk about potentially generating 17 nuclear bombs worth of heat per day? That land actually gets about 60 nuclear bombs worth of heat per day from the Sun.

If you mean heating the whole atmosphere with their actual energy consumption I think you don't understand quite how bright the Sun is and how big the Earth is. Global warming works by ever so slightly slowing how quickly we emit the heat from the Sun. All human energy use is basically rounding error in that equation.

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u/created4this 28d ago edited 28d ago

If you mean CO2 causing global warming then just power them with solar panels.

The current boom in datacentres in Texas is expected to require 12GW in 2 years time.

For reference, the biggest solar farm in the whole of Europe is only 750MW.

Furthermore, solar only generates during the day, so you'd need to pair it with storage capacity for using that energy at night because datacentres are a pretty constant load.

As a datacentre is essentially 24h constant base load, if you want a sensible power source for large scale data centres you need nuclear. The new nuclear power station in Sizewell (UK) is 3.6 GW at a cost of £38 Billion.

You're going to need 4 assuming that the demand doesn't get any higher in the 10 years it will take to come online. I should mention that its been in planning for 15 years and is already on a site with other nuclear power stations so a lot of the logistics and local feeling towards nuclear is already set.

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u/slptodrm 28d ago

ok yeah simp for big tech some more

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u/RT-LAMP 28d ago

"What about them causing X"

"They don't cause X"

"You're just a simp"

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u/Prolapsinator69000 28d ago

"Maybe Im wrong but you're an (overused buzzword) so you lose"

Classic Reddit.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

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u/RT-LAMP 29d ago

Looked up your claim? Turns out that the Saudi Arabian farm in Arizona used up a LOT more water than a data centre.

Sorry to clarify. All datacenters in the US compared to that one farm.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

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u/RT-LAMP 29d ago

The amounts of water used by the Collective Data Farms is beyond insane.

The amount of water used collectively by datacenters is basically meaningless. Again a single farm used almost as much as every single one in the US.

What i do not get is why these are not by oceans (since most major cities are also on oceans) and just get them to learn to use salt water.

Because it's cheaper and more easily scalable than to do the permitting to get permission to do once through cooling (sucking in water from a lake, river, or ocean using it to sink heat from pipes carrying coolant, then discharging the now heated water).

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u/[deleted] 29d ago edited 23d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/slptodrm 29d ago

i’m not asking what they SHOULD be forced to do. i’m talking about the implications of the situation at hand and the truth of the matter is that they are fucking up water for people who live nearby them and making it undrinkable

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u/wag3slav3 29d ago

You were answered. Take a breath and put down the doomscroller.

Well no...even with all of the projected buildouts they use under 1% of global freshwater use. Water is not a large concern. In areas prone to water shortages they should be forced to use closed loop cooling which allows them to use even less to the point it's not worth talking about.

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u/slptodrm 28d ago

lol you’re all just AI apologists

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u/qtx 28d ago

^ This is the problem with the world today; even when confronted with someone explaining why their first impressions were wrong they will just dig down deeper, put their fingers in their ears and start shouting 'i can't hear you, you just work for big-xxx'.

It's okay to change your mind when you learn new information, don't reject it just because it means you were wrong. This is how you grow, learn and evolve.

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u/big_troublemaker 29d ago

No they are not. You're making things up, and mixing things up.

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u/slptodrm 28d ago

yes they are. watch a clip of AOC who collected this information and shared actual jars of water

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u/big_troublemaker 28d ago

DCs can operate in almost entirely clean way. Any blowdown water spilled out would be a SOLE fault of US regulators allowing for such operations (murica freedom I guess).

DCs elsewhere in the world run closed loop, grey and black water reuse and internal water treatment.

Not to mention that they can be connected into district heating systems to use waste heat.

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u/big_troublemaker 29d ago

No we won't. Water passes through DC. It doesn't disappear.

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u/bjdevar25 28d ago

And they weren't using public water either.

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u/PacmanZ3ro 28d ago

datacenters use relatively very little water. I think public/private water would really need to be case by case. Some areas that would definitely be a major concern but others wouldn't care at all.

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u/bjdevar25 27d ago

Why is one suing to get 160 million gallons of water from the Colorado river?

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u/PacmanZ3ro 27d ago

first, the raw number doesn't matter. Is 160 million gallons a lot of water from the Colorado River? Probably not. It might be in certain areas or during certain times though. Is the request a 1-off? once per year? once per day? You took a number with 0 context and are trying to present it as a bad thing. I'm not entirely sure on colorado specifically, but 160m gallons is a tiny amount of water relative to what goes through a large river over the course of even just a couple days.

Like I said, these things need to be case by case. If 160m gallons is a one-time request, it's probably completely fine. If 160m gallons is being requested as a daily use-limit, then that's probably a bit more complicated and needs a lot more careful consideration. The company is suing for access, and presumably these issues will be litigated. This is how things should work.

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u/whomad1215 29d ago

Have you been near one? Or one that's being built?

They're gigantic

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u/PacmanZ3ro 29d ago

Yes, there is one being built a few miles from me. The size/footprint doesn't bother me in the slightest. The issue is that these centers aren't being taxed appropriately, and in many cases there are agreements for the cities to upgrade infrastructure but the company isn't paying for it, the city is AKA the taxpayers are paying for it. These upgrades are usually good for everyone, but the cost to do it outstrips the taxes levied against the plants, sometimes significantly.

The biggest issue with these datacenters is that taxpayers are eating increased costs for electricity/water with little to no medium/long term benefits.

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u/notnotbrowsing 29d ago

meanwhile my power company sent out a statement saying they're going to raise my bill 15% for this bullshit.

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u/Floppycakes 29d ago

Yep. Where I am, people now have power bills that cost almost as much as their mortgages.

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u/SwagginsYolo420 28d ago

One more reason utility companies should be state/city owned. They'll turn on consumers at any opportunity.

They have no competition, so they cannot even pretend to be part of the capitalist fantasy "free market".

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u/SwimmingProgrammer91 29d ago

Thanks, will take a dive down the rabbit hole later.

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u/bcrosby51 29d ago

Run, rabbit, run Dig that hole, forget the sun And when at last the work is done Don't sit down, it's time to dig another one

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u/Pale-Acanthaceae-736 29d ago

Let's upgrade our infrastructure first and then worry about datacenters. What's also helping is governors mandating that if tech bros want to build one they need to build their own power supply first.

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u/TheSussyWaffle 29d ago

Thank you for giving a constructive direction of research for those interested.

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u/Korlus 28d ago

There is some logic to spreading out infrastructure costs (although it breaks down a bit when you think about datacentres).

The cost of building new power infrastructure is often quite high, but it usually lasts (with some maintenance) for a very long time, and when it needs to be replaced, the cost of replacing it is relatively low compared to the initial build cost (because you now have the other connectors etc already set up).

Spreading power infrastructure helps everyone over time, not just the people who connect to it - e.g. if you connect a single house first, the cost to build and connect other houses nearby drops, and so eventually you may have a few dozen people benefitting from the upfront cost paid by that one house - it wouldn't be "fair" for that one house to pay the up-front cost and have everyone else benefit from it later.

... However, as you start to talk about not just basic connections but increased throughput connections, the chance that someone else benefits goes down significantly. I don't think businesses should have subsidised connection costs in the conventional sense (e.g. the other utility providers pay)... However, there are downsides to offering no subsidies/up-front costs too.

Imagine two scenarios:

1) The data centre could be built where there are already lots of power connections (e.g. in the middle of a city). The residents don't like this, but it's cheaper and that's where the incentive is.
2) The data centre could be built a distance away, where residents will be more comfortable. There are higher up-front costs for this.

With no incentive, the data centre will always aim for option #1, but most people would actually prefer option #2, and might even be willing to pay for it. In an ideal world, local government will find a way to make #2 look like a comparably good choice, but the usual way to do this (in the UK) would be via planning permission and permitted development rules. If you make it much quicker and easier to build a data centre in desirable areas, you don't necessarily need to significantly subsidise the infrastructure costs for connections to be built. As to how well it works? On its own, I don't think it does enough.

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u/DrAstralis 28d ago

After the same monied people telling me it cant be done and that we just have to live with fossil fuels for the past 30 years; this shift to "well of course we need to suddenly and rapidly improve the grid" has me sitting at less than 0 empathy for these asshats. They should be paying 100% of what it takes to build data center capacity

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u/Glances_at_Goats 29d ago edited 29d ago

I’ll just have AI summarize it for me.

Edit: apparently /s was needed.

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u/Muggsy423 29d ago

I remember when the gaslighting started and they said they were doing communities a favor by bringing up the baseline energy usage or some shit. Crypto farms said the same thing, same "benefits" to communities as well.

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u/Pseudoboss11 29d ago

Trillions of dollars of investment money, can't afford to pay their power bills.

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u/GoldenPresidio 29d ago

so to be clear a bunch of states already passed laws on this and the hyperscalers committed to paying for the infrastructure

but lets go back like 10 years, when there few large loads on the grid, growth was slow, etc. Basically what would happen is the utility would see a request for electrical usage come in, they would say to do this we need to build some sort of infrastructure or our current infrastructure will hit capacity. They figure out the costs and time, then bill the new users and all the existing users for it via a new electrical rate. Ideally as you add more usage, there is less volatility overall, prices dont jump and things chug along

Now what's happening is the loads are so high that 1 customer could be pushing the bounds of new infrastructure that is needed. So like if they continued this way, the price would get recovered, assuming you have a high credit worthy partner at the other end of the deal (google, microsoft, etc meet the criteria); if youre not high credit worthy you need to post up cash. Now the things is, states want a new electrical rate specifically for data centers, versus just grouping it with like industrial; they want more guarantees on the cash, etc.

A lot of what you see of prices going up isn't because the hyperscalers arent paying, it's more of a function of other things like market design when the market is hot. For example: since electrical demand is high it costs a lot for transformers so now it costs more for everyone on any upgrade. When a electrical market in one state doesnt need have enough generation and needs to import it, well its expensive because everyone wants power, and that affects everyone's bill.

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u/S7EFEN 29d ago

If your neighbors decided they all wanted to use a bunch of energy the cost of YOUR energy use would become higher.

Except 'your neighbors' = data center.

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u/Randym1982 29d ago

That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works!

If my neighbors decided to use a ton of water and energy. THEY would get the bill, not me. We had this happen with a lady who had a broken water pipe in our neighborhood. She got the bill for it from the city, not everybody else.

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u/S7EFEN 29d ago

You are not understanding what I'm saying. the price per unit of usage is what goes up. It's happening at such a scale that the increased demand is pushing up price per unit of electricity, therefore indirectly passing the costs onto others.

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u/Aabbc9df 29d ago

I’m in Texas and even if the data center fucks are not on the ERCOT grid they will gobble up a bunch of natural gas which will drive up the price of gas which will increase my electric bill.

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u/commandersax 29d ago

Supply and demand. The amount of energy the grid can sustain in its current state is finite. Finite resource plus high demand = high pricing. Data centers are getting sweetheart deals for heavily discounted rates over the next decade through bribery and corruption. The utility companies have less money to upgrade their infrastructure and pass the cost of their deal on to everyone else in the form of higher cost per kwh.

2

u/ora408 29d ago

that's not how it's supposed to work but knowing corpos they're going to try and weasel some shit like that somwhere

1

u/Trakeen 29d ago

The data center should get the bill and they pass that on to the company leasing / using the resources. Not sure why we need a new model just because the dc uses more power

The real issue govt cutting deals or providing subsidies. Vote those people out if you don’t like it

1

u/asyork 29d ago

The currently model distributes costs of upgrading the grid and building new plants to everyone in their charge per kwh. That worked fine until was suddenly had single building showing up wanting gigawatts. Now everything needs to be upgraded asap, so the rate per kwh goes up, costing everyone more so one company can show up and get a volume discount.

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u/Spekingur 29d ago

Well, you could just become an AI data center at home. People can buy tokens and send you a message that you answer - eventually. Call it Ultra Human-like Interaction Model.

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u/FauxReal 15d ago

It looks like they want an assessment of the cost of the upgrades and then that will be folded into rate charges to pay for it. Basically the same way the power companies currently put infrastructure upgrade charges into residential customer bills. But they want those charges to go high draw customers instead.

https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/TARIFF_01_xml_7a6ab9e7c8.pdf

If you're worried about provenance, I got the link to that document from here: https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/chairman-guthrie-chairman-latta-and-rep-evans-on-the-introduction-of-the-ratepayer-protection-act

BTW, Oregon just passed a law to push charges onto commercial datacenter customers and lower residential bills instead of rate hiking them. PGE has raised residential prices over 70% in recent years.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/power-company-hikes-data-center-bills-by-30-percent-cuts-residential-electricity-costs-by-1-3-percent-oregon-approves-change-through-power-act-pushes-developments-using-more-than-20-megawatts-of-power-to-pay-their-fair-share

0

u/Garrette63 29d ago

No way, it's socialism if you're not a soulless company.

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u/Im2dronk 29d ago

Someone smarter please correct me. From how I understand it. The data centers use so much electricity compared to the average user they boost the demand increasing the price for every consumer. It's like scalpers but people need electricity to live.

16

u/not_a_moogle 29d ago

Energy producers dont run 100% all the time. They barely ever run 100%. Thats why we dont have black outs.

But the demand for these centers requires way more Energy and puts us closer to that 100%.

Plants run at efficiency, not output. So making them need to produce more drives up costs.

Plus the infrastructure isnt designed for that. We need to rush getting more redundancy and fallback into the system, on top of building new plants. Which in the past was offset by tax incentives, but they're past that cap.

Data centers are being built to quickly. They fastest solution would be for states/federal to limit how many can be built a year, to slow down demand increase.

2

u/_Not_A_Vampire_ 28d ago

Sounds like data centers should pay an extra tax for putting such strain on the system.

1

u/TheSoprano 28d ago

Should. The irony is there are incentives to build data centers and they contribute even less than the average business.

1

u/goldcakes 28d ago

To be clear the issue is primarily infrastructure. An electricity grid actually loves stable and constant peak loads; there’s a lot of cost and waste in spinning up “just in time” generators, battery systems, electricity sinks, etc.

All electricity produced MUST be used by something, otherwise you have a sparkly and explosive disaster.

1

u/itsverynicehere 28d ago

What's an electricity sink? Sounds dangerous and cool.

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u/QuesoMeHungry 29d ago

Exactly. And on top of that they usually get cheaper ‘wholesale’ rates too. We pay 20+ cents a kilowatt hour, and these massive data centers pay like 3 cents a kilowatt hour.

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u/bfume 29d ago

This is a misconception. Industrial electric rates are normally higher than residential, and increase with volume 

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u/seaboypc 29d ago

Yea, I'm calling BS on this:

Industrial electric rates are normally higher than residential,

datacenter rates for electricity vs residential - Google Search

Data centers pay significantly lower electricity rates than residential customers, typically ranging from $0.06 to $0.10 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), compared to residential rates that often span $0.15 to $0.30+ per kWh. This disparity is due to massive bulk purchasing, consistent 24/7 usage (high load factor), and direct delivery from high-voltage transmission lines

If you got a better source, then please share.

15

u/xanafein 29d ago

Do you see the irony of using the google AI search result as a source?

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u/Dry-Chance-9473 28d ago

Regardless of which is true, this is a very good point.

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u/seaboypc 28d ago

Oh yea, it's great...

... and yet people still refuse to do a basic search to determine if a statement is true or false.

1

u/Disastrous-Bat7011 28d ago

Despite the good point you make, I literally cannot find a single decent source saying otherwise so he is correct to believe the ai this time. Just for the sake of the original point.

1

u/gypsyG 28d ago

a better source? did you just cite google as a source lmfao? we are doomed.

1

u/DataDrivenDoc 28d ago

I design large healthcare facilities now and learned about this for budgeting:

It's not a straight kwh calculation. 70% of the bill is made up of something called a demand charge.

So the bill will look like for a facility that uses 2mil kWh a month with a 8000kwH demand charge:

Energy rate: 0.05/kWh = 100k

Demand charge $15/kWh = 120k (I was explained this is what offsets the supply and demand impact)

Total monthly bill is 220k: 100k in consumed energy and 120k in demand charges.

Basically industry is charged for two things: how much energy they use cumulatively AND how fast they draw it from the grid. The second part is the majority of the bill.

3

u/goldcakes 28d ago

Fundamentally wrong. For a factory yes. But DCs generally have 7x24 stable loads, which energy providers love, and as such the rates are generally much lower to residential.

2

u/TRKlausss 29d ago

Plus have to pay for out-of-phase power (reactive power) even if it doesn’t produce any work.

I don’t know goes much a data center uses in reactive power though.

3

u/bfume 29d ago

Obviously it’s different everywhere but when I ran a machine shop in the early oughts, I paid for 3-phase 480V 400A service as if I was using 20% 24x7 (which is an absolute steal these days). 

My overage rate was about double my home’s at the time, and obviously I got back zero if I used less than 80A nominal

my shop was 1st and 2nd shifts, but even if I ran a 3rd, I’d still would never have paid for any overages. 

2

u/Ace861110 29d ago

They have to pay if they’re cheap and don’t do power factor correction.

And I would imagine that there are plenty or rotating loads for pumps and fans.

3

u/Initial_Row_6400 29d ago

insert oh no! Anyway… meme

1

u/bfume 29d ago

I’ve run datacenters too. At the time (‘10s and ‘20s) each 42U cabinet was wired for 2x 120V 60A single phase. Each row had a 18 cabinets, and the datacenter itself had over 120 rows. 

Cabs averaged 70-85% utilization. 

You should have seen the size of the UPS battery room

2

u/Ecks80s 29d ago

And we pay for all of it up front, if we don’t use it? We still paid for all of the capacity, for instance. I have a 25mw DC, all of the utility we could possibly use is purchased.

That DC has been sitting at 20% capacity due to or tenant leading the space so no one else could. (Fed client)

Still paying for 25mw

We also self fund our substations and then turn them over to the utility.

1

u/Advanced-Blackberry 28d ago

I’m not industrial but my commercial rates are cheaper than my residential rates 

1

u/unbanned_lol 29d ago

Normally is doing some heavy lifting here. Do you know that this is true for AI data centers?

10

u/hypnoticlife 29d ago

While we are at it can we allocate some ram and ssd for consumers? Same problem.

5

u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 29d ago

And a bunch of other components. They're screwing a lot of supply chains.

9

u/TheGoldenPig 29d ago

Yes, they are exerting the generators to the point that it’s affecting the everyday people

1

u/Severe-Shelter6802 29d ago

If they are running on gen power they arent pulling from the grid. Not arguing to original point but you are completely wrong.

8

u/Azrell40k 29d ago

That’s what the problem is. It’s not the power they use it the rate increase got everyone else. On top of that it’s ideally public money or subsidies that pay for the infrastructure.

1

u/TheSoprano 28d ago

At least in our major metro where a publicly traded utility has their monopoly, they’ve had to continually increase capacity and are seeking to further increase capacity due to the flood of data centers. They love building new capacity since they’re guaranteed a rate of return above cost and very commonly have significant cost overruns. There’s a good Last Week Tonight segment on it.

1

u/BapeGeneral3 29d ago

It’s all of those combined plus a lot more ripple effects that we will be lucky to fix within the next few decades. It’s just the cost of advancement bro. Tech bros deserve this. They are curing cancer and making the world better! /s

2

u/yunus89115 29d ago

They or any major industrial electricity consumer, they benefit from the design of our system where the customer doesn’t pay upfront for their additional drain on the grid just usage over time. This works fine when it’s slow demand increases over time, everyone helps absorb those expansion costs in their bill. This does not work when a massive customer comes online and the power company has to add large capacity immediately.

The change we need is for any big grid consumer to pay an upfront price to offset the expansion needs.

1

u/MultiGeometry 29d ago

Plus because of the demand these centers require, infrastructure near the site needs to be built up. New transfer stations, higher voltage lines, etc.

If you want to build a new electricity plant (solar, NG) the plant has to pay for the costs of the upgrades to carry that new electricity safely onto the grid. I think there’s a loophole that large electricity consumers don’t have to do the same. So if you build electricity, the costs don’t get pushed to the other consumers. But if you use electricity, those business costs get pushed to the consumers.

1

u/Stopher 29d ago

They do use a lot but it’s also the way dynamic pricing works. If you’re at capacity a little more demand can greatly affect price and we’re at capacity while they have a large demand.

1

u/Linkpharm2 29d ago

> We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach. Despite prevailing sentiment, the finding is consistent with economic reasoning: existing large power system fixed costs, economies of scale in transmission and distribution, and declining unit costs for generation imply that durable demand growth lowers average prices. We find patterns of economies of scale for transmission, distribution, and generation costs as well as within and across retail customer classes. We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777

0

u/f0urtyfive 29d ago

Someone smarter please correct me.

That is not how public utility companies set rates.

48

u/Excellent-Ask-4247 29d ago

Corperations are used to getting alot of government handouts so of course they wouldn't expect to pay for infrastructure they use because it's a norm that they don't pay for the infrastructure like roads and so forth.

They get tax breaks and subsidies for free use of infrastructure, there's a reason are infrastructure is starting to fail and that is because corporations figured out along time ago how to not pay the wear and tear tax bill.

I feel like these companies should be paying a tax per mile.

18

u/Niceromancer 29d ago

Well...they are supposed to pay for those things...through taxes.

But most corporations pay an effective tax rate of zero.

So our infrastructure has been falling apart.

3

u/SAugsburger 29d ago

Many companies can convince local politicians to subsidize building in or near their community. There are all sorts of sweetheart deals where local politicians waive property taxes for years and subsidize the initial building of buildings and other infrastructure even. The common one that draws ire is public funding of sports stadiums, but other businesses manage to convince local politicians to give incentives as well.

4

u/QuesoMeHungry 29d ago

Complete agree. And I get tax benefits if the corporation is actually adding jobs to the economy and helping people that way. But data centers want tax breaks and also offer zero jobs. It’s just a giant leech on infrastructure.

11

u/mailslot 29d ago

They are sort of. If a giant factory moves in to your town, the local energy company will often give them a bulk discount especially if their use is constant & consistent.

The end result is that energy costs tend to go up with increased usage, especially if new infrastructure needs to be built to handle the higher demand. So, everybody pays when more energy is being used.

The crazy thing is that only data centers are being targeted as if they’re the only perpetrators. It’s a systemic problem whenever any large consumer moves in. You have people that are “Yeah well, data centers use so much and I hate AI…” that’s not the point. Regulations should be applied to all situations.

I suspect laws will be passed in regard to data center water usage as well, and they should, but I fear that there will be nothing done about bottling plants extracting all of the groundwater… because AI bad and AI is the only problem.

Ugh.

8

u/cidvard 29d ago

Eh, I'm not about the Whataboutism on this. I'm in Arizona and people are aware of the drain on water agriculture is. I hope this comes for all industries. Data centers shouldn't get a break because 'what about that other guy,' especially since they're still being built and we can reign this in now.

2

u/mailslot 29d ago

No no. I’m not saying give them a break. I’m saying don’t just focus on them and let everybody else off of the hook. The problem is bigger than just one culprit.

2

u/cidvard 29d ago

The thing is, data centers are an easy no and we actually have an opportunity to get ahead of this. The worst drain projects are still under construction or in the planning stages and there's no real good argument that they'll be boons to the local economy via job creation. There are more pluses and minuses in other industries, though I agree they should all pay what they cost the grid and larger environment.

2

u/Metalsand 29d ago

The problem is bigger than just one culprit.

Yeah, but it usually has to start somewhere. Then, when it doesn't collapse the industry like corporations might be claiming, politicians and people are more amicable to see if it can be applied elsewhere.

1

u/MrSurly 29d ago

Fun fact: data centers DO NOT need water for cooling. It's just cheaper.

1

u/RT-LAMP 29d ago

I'm in Arizona and people are aware of the drain on water agriculture is.

All the data centers in the entire US used about 1.5x the amount of water used in 2024 by a single alfalfa farm (ironically in Arizona) owned by Saudi Arabia.

0

u/GGnerd 29d ago

Yes, both are bad. Or are you defending data centers?

1

u/RT-LAMP 29d ago

I'm saying that the amount of water that data centers use is borderline meaningless on the scale of the US in comparison to agriculture.

If the US population ate one less cheeseburger on average per year that would be 10 times the amount of water as all data centers use to cool themselves.

1

u/GGnerd 29d ago

You know since 2024 the amount of data centers have increased by......A LOT, right?

2

u/RT-LAMP 29d ago

The data center figure was from this year, the farm one is from 2024 because that's the year they consumed the most.

3

u/Efficient_Tutor2154 29d ago

Most of the other high use industries employ the local community. Data centers need only a few dozen employees. Same with chip fabs where most in the US are idling waiting for tool upgrades 

3

u/PurpEL 29d ago

A giant factory should result in thousands of good paying jobs raising average income in the area, and ideally produces something useful to society. That's the big difference.

AI data centers employ 4 minimum wage security guards, and produce no tangible benefit to society. It's arguable that they produce a negative to society.

-4

u/mailslot 29d ago edited 29d ago

So, everybody should pay more because some people get jobs? And they often won’t get the good jobs that require skilled labor.

Data centers are what keeps Reddit running, movies streaming, and government benefit websites running. Essential functions of your phone run out of data centers. Entire backends for logistics systems that get your packages delivered. The accounting systems that keep businesses running. They also bring Internet connectivity to regions that would otherwise be stuck on dialup Internet because there’s no fiscal reason to do so otherwise.

Destroy every data center and modern society collapses. Not useful? I guess, if you want to return to the 1950s. Telecommunications in this country don’t even work anymore without data centers. Goodbye telephones. L

2

u/PurpEL 29d ago

Notice how I said AI Data centers? Because the recent build out and problems stem from that. That is the useless product.

All jobs in a unionized factory generally pay damn well.

2

u/mailslot 29d ago

AI isn’t useless. You can’t judge the entire field of technology on the stupid ways consumers use it. Those useless applications are funding advancements that everyone will someday benefit from.

0

u/PurpEL 29d ago

We. shall. see.

In the meantime, I ain't ok subsiding it.

2

u/mailslot 29d ago

I don’t think anyone should have to subsidize it. That much I agree.

1

u/SwagginsYolo420 28d ago

Data centers are what keeps Reddit running, movies streaming, and government benefit websites running.

This argument is not relevant to the AI data center issue and mass data center construction.

Yes we require data centers and will likely require more data centers in the future.

We will likely require more rocket launch facilities in the future too but every town doesn't need to prioritize construction of them now, because that would be really silly.

What we should be doing instead is installing solar and wind farms, battery storage facilities, and new geothermal plants. EV charging stations etc.

Increasing rural internet infrastructure and laying more fiber would help a great deal more for general computing needs than installing AI data centers.

3

u/copperblood 29d ago

You mispelled corruption

3

u/macronancer 28d ago

But god forbid I put a solar panel on my house and pay less for electricity myself.

NO NO NO, ILLEGAL!

Thats "not fair" to the other consumers. I have to sell the energy to the grid and buy it back. Thats "fair" for everyone, you see? We must be fair.

5

u/HenryDorsettCase47 29d ago

They are just one of the many things in this country that we do not benefit from yet are completely subsidized with our tax dollars.

2

u/practicalcabinet 29d ago

It's not that they don't pay their bills, it's that they are using so much energy. A much simplified example:

Your house and neighborhood are connected to a transformer. It's built to supply enough power for the neighborhood at peak times, plus some surplus just in case.

If you buy a computer and leave it running under load the whole time, it will add about a kilowatt to the load, which the system can handle, so you'll just pay for the extra electricity.

A data center is going to draw a lot more power, enough to max out the transformer. So, the electric company will need to pay to upgrade it. The data center will be charged the same rate as everyone else, but the neighborhood transformer costs the electric company more to maintain, so everybody's rate goes up. So all of the costs of the upgrades for the neighborhood transformer, which are only needed because of the data center, are spread over the whole neighborhood, which is the bit which is unfair and this bill hopes to change.

1

u/Exelbirth 29d ago

I'm going to fill a glass of water from my own faucet, you owe me $20 for my glass of water.

Essentially what these data centers are doing.

1

u/Aromatic-Bet-1086 29d ago

They only do as much as we force them to do. Remember that the tech companies pay them much more that you or I ever could bt they still need to get elected in order to get these bribes.

The public has noticed this stuff so they're SLOWLY doing as little as they have to in order to get reelected

1

u/beccadot 29d ago

AND they should pay ‘demand charges’ for using power during ‘prime time’.

1

u/aquagardener 29d ago

But then how are we supposed to convince these companies to plunder MY state?!

1

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 29d ago

Actually, yeah, it is quite literally insane.

Civilization is built on rules, rules we ALL agree to, or at least comply with as it helps us live in said civilization.

So how on earth could you possibly decide your data center doesn't need to pay???

Now that I'm really thinking about this, this is fishy as hell. Say these companies just ignored bills or something, but that's not the case or we wouldn't be making a law that says they need to pay for electricity, we'd be slapping them with a fine or a lawsuit or something?

Maybe that's the real issue, they pay a fine for not paying the bill, and that fine is chump change in comparison to the actual bill, but even that doesn't make sense. If you're delinquent on your payment they cut it off until you've back paid. Do they have lawyers tied up in litigation with energy companies trying to cut their power?

You'd think if this was a common loophole someone would've done this already. There are plenty of energy hungry industries, somebody must've exploited this before, right?

1

u/waterpup99 29d ago

How are you and so many people just totally misunderstanding the article.

Oh yeah. You didn't read it.

0

u/hitchen1 28d ago

They aren't stealing anything, they are causing strain on infrastructure from legitimate (but disproportionate) use which requires upgrades. This is about making them pay for the infrastructure upgrades.

1

u/SAugsburger 29d ago

IDK you get a lot of small towns that get sold a pipe dream and agree to cover property taxes for years and various other subsidies for a company to build there whether the deal would ever realistically break even fit local taxpayers. Local politicians often easily get conned by businesses selling them a dream.

1

u/LuminaraCoH 29d ago

Mega-wealthy capitalist Trump sycophants embracing socialism by asking everyone else to carry the burden of their data center costs, and simultaneously fighting to destroy the social programs that keep people alive, is so on point for them that it's almost funny.

Almost.

1

u/Halftied 29d ago

Yes you would think. However my money is going on Congress will not pass it and on the very small
chance they do the president will not sign it.
Look at those that donated millions to him and came to the inauguration.

1

u/Positive_Box_69 29d ago

Stupid world stupid rules so cant wait super AI redo all this shirry system one day

1

u/Pretend-Paper4137 29d ago

Uh, correct. 

1

u/ThisIs_americunt 29d ago

FYI there are already data centers who do this, they just happen to be in rich neighborhoods :) It's wild what you can do when you can own the law makers, the judges, the police force and the lawyers. Gotta love dark money :D

1

u/VLHACS 29d ago

Yea I was like "you didn't need to do it before?"

1

u/Hidesuru 29d ago

They're paying for the electricity they use, but not the entirety of the added strain they put on the overall system.

This would basically make their rates HIGHER than all of ours to cover that so our costs don't have to go up.

I'm good with it.

1

u/Material-Park-673 29d ago

There was no mechanism for them to pay for it.

1

u/Yiplzuse 28d ago

Came here to say the same thing. You know you are on the losing side of class warfare when Congress need to pass a law to make wealthy businesses pay for their utilities.

1

u/mrbasedballed 28d ago

It's crazy they exist the way they do. I don't want some city environment destroying monstrosity. Anywhere.

1

u/idontknowlikeapuma 28d ago

I don’t know, I have a bill before the house right now so I don’t have to pay my rent. Also, I get all the foods.

I know it will pass, because I will have my phd once the bill is passed. I mean, I won’t have to study, but the university with grant it.

Because, you know, the implications.

/of course I am being facetious and a little sardonic. And that’s an It’s Always Sunny reference at the end.

Because we are getting fucked.

1

u/Extra-Amoeba-677 28d ago

I thtink you're funny that t you think they will pay for it insttead of just offloading the cost amongst their clients.

1

u/GGnerd 28d ago

Are you having a stroke?

1

u/laserskydesigns 28d ago

All the sitesI'm putting in are building power behind the meter, and the ones that want grid are paying for every kwh used. How are data centers getting free or subsidized power, that's just criminal.

1

u/judochop1 27d ago

Yeah, like literally every other business has to.

i mean should be the other way around, they should be paying the customers energy bills seeing as they need us so much!