{"id":103605,"date":"2025-10-05T04:12:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T04:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/103605\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T04:12:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T04:12:08","slug":"ai-data-centers-are-skyrocketing-regular-peoples-energy-bills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/103605\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Data Centers Are Skyrocketing Regular People&#8217;s Energy Bills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" class=\"archive-post-thumb article-featured-image w-full h-auto mb-3\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/ai-data-centers-electricity-bills.jpg\"   fetchpriority=\"high\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1075\" alt=\"AI data centers in the US are spiking nearby customers electricity bills and bringing other unexpected costs.\"\/><\/p>\n<p>\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n<p class=\"pw-incontent-excluded article-paragraph skip\">As some of us continue to <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/neoscope\/brain-eeg-chatgpt\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">calcify our brains asking ChatGPT to answer an email<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-relationship-emotional-cheating\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">blow up our lives for an AI side chick<\/a>, others<strong> <\/strong>are paying hand over fist for it via power bills. Wholesale electricity costs have increased as much as 267 percent since 2020 in areas near data centers, and consumers are emptying their pockets for the power companies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">A very granular <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/graphics\/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices\/\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Bloomberg analysis<\/a> of wholesale electricity prices across the country paints a picture of doubled wholesale prices and soaring<strong> <\/strong>consumer costs over the past five years. It\u2019s complex, but one thing is for certain: those within 50 miles of data centers are bearing the brunt of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">The issue is that about two thirds of the country\u2019s power consumption runs on either a state or regional grid. This means the costs necessary for network expansion and maintenance is trickling down to residents and businesses\u2019 electricity bills.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">For example, according to Bloomberg\u2018s analysis of data provided by energy analytics firms Grid Status and DC Byte, Baltimore has seen an increase of 125 percent on its wholesale electricity price, and<strong> <\/strong>residents have<strong> <\/strong>experienced an average monthly electric bill<strong> <\/strong>increase of over $17<strong> <\/strong>in the last year, with expectations of another<strong> <\/strong>jump of<strong> <\/strong>$4 in 2026. In Texas, data centers are unequivocally the largest<strong> <\/strong>new source of power consumption.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">Bloomberg<strong> <\/strong>projects that the data center power demand will double by 2035. That would be equivalent to just shy of 10<strong> <\/strong>percent of the total electricity demand in the country, and would be the biggest increase since air conditioning became popular in the 1960s, both of which carry significant<strong> <\/strong>climate change implications.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\">It\u2019s also just unfair. Tech companies and their backers are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure right now, which may or may not ultimately pay off \u2014 but offloading costs onto regular people who are already struggling with sky-high inflation isn\u2019t part of any reasonable deal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"article-paragraph skip\"><strong>More on AI data centers:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/ai-datacenters-raising-electric-bills\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">AI Datacenters Are Raising Nearby Residents\u2019 Electric Bills<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images As some of us continue to calcify our brains&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,986,18,4625,19,17,3499,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-103605","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-data-centers","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-electricity","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-power","17":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103605\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}