"As outrage spreads over energy-hungry data centers, politicians from President Donald Trump to local lawmakers have found rare bipartisan agreement over insisting that tech companies - and not regular people - must foot the bill for the exorbitant amount of electricity required for artificial intelligence. But that might be where the agreement ends. The price of powering data centers has become deeply intertwined with concerns over the cost of living,"
""'Fair share' is a pretty squishy term, and so it's something that the industry likes to say because 'fair' can mean different things to different people," said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. It's a shift from last year, when states worked to woo massive data center projects and Trump directed his administration to do everything it could to get them electricity."
Policymakers across parties are demanding that technology companies pay for the substantial electricity required by AI data centers. Rising energy costs and the link between power prices and cost-of-living concerns have made the issue politically salient ahead of midterm elections. Tech firms promise to pay a "fair share," but the term remains undefined and contested. Energy policy has shifted from incentivizing data center projects to local resistance and utility bill increases. The backlash has already produced electoral consequences, including Democrats ousting two Republicans from Georgia's utility regulatory commission.
Read at Fast Company
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