REALITY: Data center operators and utility companies are working to bring costs down, with many large companies agreeing to cover costs.

• Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, agreeing to build, bring, or buy new generation resources and cover the cost of all power delivery infrastructure upgrades required for their data centers, ensuring such expenses are not passed to American households.
• Georgia Power is working with the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) to ensure that growth from data centers benefits all customers, and has frozen base rates through at least 2028, with additional savings for customers planned after that.
• Duke Energy CEO, Harry Sideris said, “Every new data center that we’re signing up, every new gigawatt of data center, is actually going to reduce the cost to our customers.”
• PG&E CEO, Patti Poppe said, “We are showing for every gigawatt of new demand we add to the grid we can lower rates by 1%.”
• Entergy recently announced “approximately $5 billion in total savings for 2.3 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi because of data center customer agreements in those states.”

REALITY: Electricity prices are a complex structure. Blaming data centers for increased prices leaves an incomplete and incorrect answer.

• A UC Berkeley study finds “if you took California out of the average – with its wildfire management costs and high subsidies for rooftop solar paid by other customers – the average [residential electricity] price in the rest of the country was actually lower in 2024 than in 2014, after adjusting for inflation.”
• Maine, which has very few data centers, had the nation’s highest year-over-year energy increase at 36%. Virginia, which has the most data centers, saw a negligible 3% increase in electricity bills.
• Contrary to popular belief, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report late last year found that “state-level load growth in recent years (through 2024) has tended to reduce average retail electricity prices.”

REALITY: Data centers are footing the bill for much-needed upgrades to the aging power grid, saving money for American ratepayers.

• Amazon data centers “in some regions actually pay more than the costs needed to power them.”
• Investing for the future: Georgia Power plans to spend $16 billion on adding 10 gigawatts to the grid to accommodate the new demand.
• The Department of Energy highlighted that a SoftBank data center development project in Ohio will cover $4.2 billion worth of new electrical transmission infrastructure.