As electricity bills climb across the nation, the booming artificial intelligence industry is facing intense scrutiny. The massive data centers required to power AI are being blamed for significant price hikes in several states, turning up the political heat as mid-term elections approach.

While residential utility bills saw a 6 percent average increase nationwide in August compared to the previous year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, some states with a high concentration of data centers experienced much steeper rises. Electricity prices surged by 13 percent in Virginia, 16 percent in Illinois, and 12 percent in Ohio during the same period.

These states are at the heart of the American data center boom. Virginia, in particular, has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, with 666 facilities, according to Datacentermap.com. Illinois follows with 244, and Ohio has 193. All three are primarily served by the same grid operator, PJM Interconnection, the largest in the United States.

The unprecedented demand from these energy-hungry facilities is straining the electric grid. An independent watchdog monitoring PJM’s power capacity auctions found that data center demand accounted for $9.3 billion, or 63 percent, of the total power capacity bill for 2024. Data centers are projected to use up as much as 12 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2028, according to a U.S. Department of Energy report.

“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” according to Monitoring Analytics’ June Independent Market Monitor report.

There is a growing backlash against the rising costs, which is becoming a central issue in state politics. In Virginia, newly elected Governor Abigail Spanberger successfully campaigned on the rising cost of living, placing part of the blame on data centers and vowing to make tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share.”

The higher costs often appear stealthily, embedded within electricity supply charges rather than as a distinct line item on bills. David Lapp, Maryland’s People’s Counsel, the state’s top official focused on consumer advocacy for utility bills, warns that this is just the beginning. “Existing customers are taking hits now and will take much greater hits going forward,” he told CNN.

Looming on the horizon are even greater costs. PJM has proposed more than $11 billion in transmission upgrades, primarily to serve new data centers. According to Mr. Lapp, these costs, passed on to ratepayers, could eventually top $40 billion.

“We’re looking at the equivalent of Maryland’s [entire electricity] demand built up over more than a century, being built in Northern Virginia in five years,” Mr. Lapp said.

A Harvard Law School paper from March found that despite the regional cost-sharing model, ratepayers in Virginia and Maryland will bear the brunt of infrastructure built to serve the world’s richest companies.

“The very same rate structures that have socialized the costs of reliable power delivery are now forcing the public to pay for infrastructure designed to supply a handful of exceedingly wealthy corporations,” said the paper.

The political fallout is not just local. Some Democrats in Congress have criticized the close relationship between the White House and major tech companies. Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently condemned what they called the administration’s “sweetheart deals with Big Tech companies,” accusing it of failing to protect consumers from “being forced to subsidize the cost of data centers.”

While other factors like an aging grid and inflation contribute to rising electricity costs, the watchdog report from Monitoring Analytics emphasized the unique pressure from AI. It said that the rapid load growth from data centers is “unprecedented” and that it is “misleading to assert that the capacity market results are simply just a reflection of supply and demand.”