Senator Warren, Lawmakers Open Investigation into Big Tech Data Centers’ Role in Driving Up Families’ Utility Costs

Senator Warren, Lawmakers Open Investigation into Big Tech Data Centers' Role in Driving Up Families' Utility Costs

As AI and Big Tech firms, including Google, Amazon, and Meta, build energy-guzzling data centers and make opaque agreements with utility companies, consumers are left holding the bill for these trillion-dollar companies.

Text of Letters (PDF)

Washington, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) opened an investigation into the extent to which big tech data centers are driving up consumers' electricity costs. The senators sent letters to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix.

"We write in light of alarming reports that tech companies are passing on the costs of building and operating their data centers to ordinary Americans as AI data centers' energy usage has caused residential electricity bills to skyrocket in nearby communities," wrote the lawmakers. "Through these utility price increases, American families bankroll the electricity costs of trillion-dollar tech companies."

As American AI companies build new models, their AI data centers require more and more energy from the grid. A single data center uses enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes, and the U.S. Department of Energy projects that data centers could make up 12% of all U.S. power consumption by 2028.

As a result, utility companies have spent billions of dollars updating the electrical grid to accommodate the data centers' unprecedented energy demands, including building expensive new transmission lines and power plants. These infrastructure buildouts cost billions of dollars: the utility Indiana Michigan Power estimates that building new power plants to meet data center demand in the region will cost $17 billion over the next several years. These costs appear to be recouped by raising residential utility bills, meaning American consumers could end up subsidizing the energy demands of Big Tech. Since President Trump took office, household electric bills have gone up 13% nationally.

"Recent increases to consumers' utility bills are directly linked to the tech industry's data center buildout," wrote the lawmakers. "When utilities expand their grid infrastructure, they incorporate the cost of expansion into their utility rates, passing the extra costs onto their customers."

The contracts between data centers and utility companies are almost always confidential, leaving the public in the dark on why their electric bill keeps going up. That's why the senators are pushing for answers from these companies and asking them what they intend to do to mitigate these cost concerns.

"Tech companies have paid lip service in support of covering their data centers' energy costs, but their actions have shown the opposite… And on top of failing to pay their fair share of their electricity rates, tech companies regularly hide as much information as possible from the communities in which their data centers will be built," continued the lawmakers. "To protect consumers, data centers must pay a greater share of the costs upfront for future energy usage and updates to the electrical grid provided specifically to accommodate data centers' energy needs."

The senators are pushing these companies for answers to their probe by no later than January 12, 2026.

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