Soaring electricity prices fuel backlash against AI data centers

Voter anger at surging electricity prices is fueling political backlash against the artificial intelligence industry’s data centers, with Democrats accusing the Trump administration of failing to address the issue as they zero in on affordability ahead of next year’s mid-term elections.

Abigail Spanberger won last week’s governor’s race in Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, after promising to make the industry “pay their own way and their fair share” of rising electricity costs.

New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill has promised to declare a state of emergency over electric bills on her first day in office and freeze prices in the Garden State. Two Democrats were elected to Georgia’s commission that regulates utilities, breaking total Republican control, with one of the candidates arguing that prices are rising in the Peach State in part due to data centers.

On the heels of the election victories, Democratic senators in Washington led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took aim this week at what they described as the White House’s “sweetheart deals with Big Tech companies,” accusing the administration of failing to protect consumers from “being forced to subsidize the cost of data centers.”

“As a result, everyday Americans are already being forced into bidding wars with trillion-dollar companies to keep the lights on at home,” the senators wrote Monday in a letter demanding solutions from the White House.

President Donald Trump promised to cut families’ electric bills by 50% in his first year in office. But residential prices in the U.S. increased about an average 6% in August nationwide compared to the same-period in 2024, according to October data from the Energy Information Administration. Prices soared about 21% in New Jersey, 13% in Virginia and about 5% in Georgia in the same period.

The reasons for price hikes vary by state and region, said Abraham Silverman, who served as general counsel for New Jersey’s public utility board from 2019 until 2023 under outgoing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

But data centers are playing the main role in rising bills on the PJM Interconnection electric grid that serves New Jersey and Virginia, Silverman said. PJM is the largest grid in the U.S., reaching more than 65 million people across 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest and South.

“We are basically adding a Philadelphia’s worth of new electricity users to the grid every year, starting in 2025 and showing no signs of slowing,” Silverman said of the national increase in demand. “Where is that load growth coming from? The answer is data centers.”

Surging prices

The conditions that led to surging household electricity prices this year, particularly in the PJM region, took root before the second Trump administration entered office,…