{"id":213025,"date":"2026-02-13T08:26:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T13:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/13\/politicians-scramble-on-data-centers-after-putting-their-voters-on-the-hook-for-big-techs-job-killing-ai-efforts\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T08:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T13:30:09","slug":"politicians-scramble-on-data-centers-after-putting-their-voters-on-the-hook-for-big-techs-job-killing-ai-efforts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/13\/politicians-scramble-on-data-centers-after-putting-their-voters-on-the-hook-for-big-techs-job-killing-ai-efforts\/","title":{"rendered":"Politicians scramble on data centers after putting their voters on the hook for Big Tech’s job-killing AI efforts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Politicians scramble on data centers after putting their voters on the hook for Big Tech’s job-killing AI efforts<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/fortune.com\/2026\/02\/13\/data-center-affordability-utility-electricity-bill\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-13 08:26:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n

As outrage spreads over\u00a0energy-hungry data centers, politicians from President Donald Trump to local lawmakers have found rare bipartisan agreement over insisting that tech companies \u2014 and not regular people \u2014 must foot the bill for the exorbitant amount of electricity required for artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

But that might be where the agreement ends.<\/p>\n

The price of powering data centers has become deeply intertwined with concerns over the cost of living, a dominant issue in the upcoming midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and governors\u2019 offices.<\/p>\n

Some efforts to address the challenge may be coming too late, with energy costs on the rise. And even though tech giants are pledging to pay their \u201cfair share,\u201d there\u2019s little consensus on what that means.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Fair share\u2019 is a pretty squishy term, and so it\u2019s something that the industry likes to say because \u2018fair\u2019 can mean different things to different people,\u201d said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shift from last year, when\u00a0states worked to woo\u00a0massive data center projects and Trump directed his administration to do everything it could to get them electricity. Now there\u2019s a backlash as\u00a0towns fight data center\u00a0projects and some utilities\u2019 electricity bills have risen quickly.<\/p>\n

Anger over the issue\u00a0has already had electoral consequences, with Democrats ousting two Republicans from Georgia\u2019s utility regulatory commission in November.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoters are already connecting the experience of these facilities with their electricity costs and they\u2019re going to increasingly want to know how government is going to navigate that,\u201d said Christopher Borick, a pollster and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion.<\/p>\n

Energy race stokes concerns<\/h4>\n

Data centers are sprouting across the U.S., as tech giants scramble to meet worldwide demand for chatbots and other generative AI products…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Politicians scramble on data centers after putting their voters on the hook for Big Tech’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213026,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/AP26043795166336.jpg?resize=1200,600","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-213025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-generative-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213027,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213025\/revisions\/213027"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}