As hyperscale data centers expand across the country, communities across the political spectrum are meeting big tech’s encroachment with critical, organized resistance. In Maryland, Prince George’s County residents recently scored a temporary ban on data center construction permits. In Arizona, Chandler City residents, environmentalists and political groups successfully pressured the city council to vote down a rezoning request by a developer, despite lobbying from former Senator Kyrsten Sinema.

Given the ongoing water shortage crisis gripping that state, the now abandoned AI campus project’s daily water consumption — estimated at about 48,651 to 52,752 gallons per day for the main building alone, with internal estimates suggesting a fully built campus could reach roughly 96 million gallons per year —  would have been catastrophic for the local population.

To the west, Cascades Locke residents in Oregon won a striking victory by getting the local port authority to cancel a previously-approved data center project after sustained local pushback. Meanwhile, the “Don’t Dump in Peculiar” organizers in Missouri were able to block a $1.5 billion data center proposal by getting data centers removed from the city’s zoning ordinance.

Rising Electricity Costs Fuel Data Center Opposition

Residents fighting off data centers in Democratic strongholds such as New York and Maryland are arriving at the same conclusions as Trump voters in Virginia and Missouri. National polling from Pew Research Center finds that more Americans say data centers have a negative effect than a positive one on the environment, home energy costs and quality of life for people living nearby. Additional research from Climate Power shows that when voters are asked what worries them most about new AI data centers, they rate higher utility costs and rising energy consumption more often than any other concern. People are skeptical about hosting large new facilities in their own communities, especially when they see that the data centers drive up costs of water and power and harm the environment.

Across the country, utilities are planning new gas plants, substations and long distance lines that they explicitly justify as needed to serve new energy demands, largely driven by hyperscale campuses. Those investments are showing up in household bills.

Data from the Federal Reserve’s FRED database, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, show the average price of electricity in US cities rising from about 13 cents per kilowatt hour in 2019 to roughly 19 cents by early 2026, an increase of nearly 50 percent in just a few years. 

New research from Brookings finds that electricity costs overall have risen about 42 percent since 2019, well above headline inflation, and concludes that the cost of grid upgrades needed to power AI and data centers is likely being passed on to residential customers. 

The Private Ownership of Utilities Squeezes Consumers 

Investor-owned utilities (IOUs), like Duke Energy and PG&E, are eager to get data centers because each new power plant, substation, and transmission line they build expands their regulated rate base and the profits they can earn. They already supply the vast majority of US customers, serving roughly three-quarters of all electricity consumers, while publicly owned utilities and rural electric cooperatives serve the rest. That means most households are effectively captive to private utilities that have a built-in incentive to chase very large loads like hyperscale data centers, then recoup the cost of that buildout through higher bills for everyone else.

Behind the scenes, control of data center this infrastructure is rapidly concentrating. A handful of hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Meta now dominate the data center industry, while older enterprise facilities owned by banks, hospitals and manufacturers quietly shrink. Critical computing power, and the massive energy demand that comes with it, is being pulled into a small number of giant corporate campuses, concentrating profits, data, and basic energy systems in very few hands. 

Today, most big decisions about new data centers happen behind closed doors, between IOUs and hyperscale companies that both profit from locking in huge new energy loads. Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative has documented at least dozens of “special” or secret contracts in which utilities offer Meta, Google and other data center operators deals that “socialize the costs of new power plants and power lines based on the premise that the public benefits from new infrastructure.”

In effect, these billion dollar companies get custom cut‑rate deals behind closed doors, then make ordinary customers cover the gap and pay for the new infrastructure through higher bills. Utilities gain guaranteed returns on new plants and lines, while cloud and AI giants secure cheaper power, long term capacity reservations and priority access to the grid, leaving everyone else to absorb higher bills and risk. Trump’s ratepayer protection pledge likely won’t do a thing to protect consumers from these outcomes because, as Matt Sedlar points out, the pledge amounts to a “pinky swear with no enforcement mechanisms” behind it. 

Publicly owned utilities, which don’t answer to shareholders and don’t need to chase ever larger energy loads to boost profits, offer a way forward. In a public power model, communities have a more direct say in whether to court or reject a data center, how to price its electricity and water use, and how to protect household customers from cost shifting. They can also go to their elected officials for intervention when there are issues.

These fights are not about rejecting technology, but about demanding that hyperscale data centers be reined in and governed by institutions that put people and the climate ahead of private profit.