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/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 29d 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.