Americans’ AI hate wave might just be gathering steam: Data centers could hike power costs in some states over 50% by 2030
The expansion of data centers in the U.S. is significantly impacting electricity costs, with projections indicating a potential rise of over 50% in some states by 2030. This increase is largely driven by the growing demand for power from AI technologies and cryptocurrency mining. Public sentiment is shifting negatively towards AI, with many Americans opposing the establishment of data centers near their homes due to rising utility prices.
- ▪Electricity prices in the U.S. have risen faster than inflation, partly due to the demands of AI-driven infrastructure.
- ▪Data centers' share of total U.S. electricity use increased from 1.9% to 4.4% between 2018 and 2023.
- ▪In Virginia, electricity generation costs could increase by as much as 57% due to data center expansion.
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| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/data-centers-electricity-costs-us-public-opinion/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 07:02:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T07:29:57.397Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T07:29:57.397Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ZWo-F5lF0CU- |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
For years, the American power grid was a bastion of predictable stability. Throughout the 2010s, U.S. electricity demand remained flat as efficiency gains and declines in energy-intensive sectors such as manufacturing helped obscure the dawning digital age. Recommended Video But the power grid as it once was might be no match for the technological demands of the 2020s. Retail electricity prices have soared in recent years, an increase fast outpacing inflation over the same period, in part due to the rising power costs associated with the artificial intelligence-driven infrastructure boom.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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