Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environment/ai-data-centers-electricity-costs.html

by moneycantbuy • 11 months ago

66 41 11 months ago

grafmax2• 11 months ago

Not just bills. These data centers, a major driver of new energy use, are contributing to climate change. Sadly it seems to be another way for large companies to offload externalities onto the public.

kolinko2• 11 months ago

Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.

rambojohnson2• 11 months ago

Carbon neutrality doesn’t refill a drained reservoir used to cool off these machines. Running your servers on wind power doesn’t make the millions of gallons they’re dumping into cooling systems any less gone.

cma• 11 months ago

Google stopped claiming "operational carbon neutrality" shortly after the release of chatgpt.

aurareturn• 11 months ago

  Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.

It's like saying "our crypto mining energy is carbon neutral" but ignoring the fact that if the carbon neutral energy is going into crypto mining, it's not going into something more useful. If crypto mining buys all the carbon neutral energy sources, then those sources aren't being used by other industries.

We have limited carbon neutral energy production.

croes3• 11 months ago

MS revised its climate goals thanks to AI

https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...

rambojohnson2• 11 months ago

To say nothing of the exorbitant amount of water used to cool these machines, we’re on track to face a water shortage crisis long before any other climate change impact.

arghwhat4• 11 months ago

Water availability is a regional climate change impact, which does not apply everywhere due to differences in water sourcing and weather patterns and how climate change affects these.

It's very stupid to evaporate potable water on purpose in dry regions, but note that many numbers in this area are highly sensationalized by taking e.g. the maximum design capacity of the cooling system instead of the actual load, and that there are several other cooling solutions. Most proper facts die tragic deaths before they make it to mainstream news media. :/

esafak• 11 months ago

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12...

lelandbatey• 11 months ago

https://archive.is/YOo1H

brotchie• 11 months ago

But the vast majority of my $500+ a month PG&E bill is for transmission, not generation.

prasadjoglekar• 11 months ago

And according TFA, those poles and wires for transmission are a large part of the increase in costs that are forecasted.

Ideally, the folks who request the new plants and transmission lines pay for them, but it appears tech cos are attempting to pass the transmission cost burden onto residential consumers.

teeray• 11 months ago

Privatize the gains, publicize the losses

SR2Z4• 11 months ago

Poles and wires for a datacenter should be much cheaper than for a subdivision.

taeric5• 11 months ago

500 a month sounds steep. I'm assuming you live somewhere that requires AC every day?

The article referred to driving prices up from 2020 due to making the infrastructure stronger by as much as 30%. Which, yeah, about 150ish of your bill.

It is less clear on how much it will need to go up because of increased demand? The prediction is 8%. Which, again, not nothing. But it is telling that there is more increase from infrastructure than there is generation? I don't know that that will change?

hellisothers• 11 months ago

My bill last month was $450 and I don’t own an AC, it was around $350 before I got a plug in hybrid but every year it goes up double digit percentages.

hammock• 11 months ago

You can thank all the wildfires for that

Avicebron• 11 months ago

Yeah...I hate when wildfires neglect their infrastructure to the point that they start themselves

0_____0• 11 months ago

That isn't unique to PG&E. Clear across the country, my utility bill is close to 60% transmission fees.

Also what are you doing? Running a flux capacitor?

nullc• 11 months ago

PG&E peak residential rates hit over 50 cts/kwh.

PG&E works with a capture PUC and cost plus accounting where the only way for the company to increase profits is to drive up expenses.

buckle80172• 11 months ago

this is nonsense and the author even admits it

In the coming years, artificial intelligence could turbocharge those increases

the cost of residential power is going up because of the shift away from natural gas towards solar

failing to admit this or worse lying about it is not going to actually help long term

kolinko2• 11 months ago

what? solar is cheaper than natural gas.

mensetmanusman• 11 months ago

Solar+battery is the proper comparison.

buckle80172• 11 months ago

It's absolutely not.

Solar with batteries that provide power year long are so expensive they do not exist.

At most you get one day of battery.

specialist• 11 months ago

You need to distinguish between generation and transmission.

southernplaces7• 11 months ago

Oh hey, not even crypto pulled this kind of thing off, but here we now see crickets from certain parts of the tech community (on this site especially) about this particular gargantuan use of electricity. I guess it's no longer a problem when the people who employee you are doing it, despite the vast amount of slop, spam and other garbage being generated among the occassionally (only apparently so far) productive uses of LLM technology.

As far as that goes, i'd love to see a well researched breakdown of just what percentage of LLM technology is actually being used for anything productive, and what percentage is just being pissed into industrialized spam.

LLMs even have the whole crime angle neatly covered, considering all the innovative uses they're being put to by the same people who brought us ransoms paid in crypto. Would be interesting to see the numbers on how that breaks down too.

waltercool• 11 months ago

It's usually the opposite.

When a company requires lot more energy, power plants are expected to produce lot more.

When a power plant produce a lot, the low consumption rates tend to get cheaper. It's gets cheaper to produce energy as the demand increases.

This is, of course, considering the input material is not scarce, like hydro power plants or wind power. Everything else (coal, oil, nuclear, gas, solar) should be easy to increase supply/demand.

thedudeabides5• 11 months ago

bullish silver

Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone

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