American families are getting squeezed at the electric meter while politicians pat themselves on the back about falling grocery and gas prices, and Big Tech quietly gobbles up the grid’s spare capacity. Federal forecasts show U.S. electricity use is headed for record highs in 2025 and 2026, with data centers — especially those built for artificial intelligence — singled out as a major driver of the new demand.
Make no mistake: this is not a mysterious market force but the predictable consequence of hyperscale server farms that chew through power the way factories once chewed through coal. Independent research and industry forecasts warn that data centers could represent a much larger slice of national electricity consumption in the coming decade, a load that was never meant to be shouldered by ordinary ratepayers.
Big Tech knows the scoreboard and is acting accordingly, striking long-term power deals and underwriting the resurrection of mothballed nuclear plants just to keep the lights on for their racks. Microsoft’s 20-year agreement to buy power tied to the restart of Three Mile Island — rebranded and repurposed to serve AI computing — is a clear signal that these companies will go to any length to secure cheap, reliable energy for their data centers.
That deal sounds bold until you remember who ultimately pays for fragile planning and bloated projects: ordinary consumers and taxpayers. Reporting has already raised questions about whether reopening dormant reactors and other subsidy-driven projects are being underwritten in part by federal programs, turning what should be private infrastructure decisions into public liabilities.
Meanwhile, the political class and federal regulators are asleep at the wheel — too obsessed with green virtue signaling and permitting nightmares to stop the march toward grid stress. Instead of rolling back strangling regulations that slow new generation, transmission, and sensible grid investments, elected officials reward political theater while energy reliability is sacrificed on the altar of ideology.
The sane, conservative answer is simple: let markets work, insist that hyperscalers pay the true cost of the power they consume, and clear the permitting paths for real, dispatchable generation and transmission upgrades. If data centers want more power, they should build it, pay for it, and participate in market solutions that shore up reliability rather than offloading costs onto the rest of us; research even shows that intelligently managed HPC facilities can provide useful grid flexibility if properly incentivized.
Americans deserve a grid that serves citizens first, not a shadow economy of corporate computing farms that turn the lights off in neighborhoods when supply gets tight. Lawmakers and regulators must stop pretending that virtue-signaling energy policy protects people, and start prioritizing resilience, accountability, and common-sense market reforms so the next electric bill doesn’t become the final straw.
