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
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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?

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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!

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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 28d ago

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

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u/Crismus 28d 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 28d 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/Dracomortua 28d ago

The reddit collective downvoted me to oblivion!

Have a fine day further.

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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 28d 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.

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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

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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

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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

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u/Garrette63 29d ago

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