We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]

This video is unconvincing. The thesis of the video basically boils down to "AI companies are using electricity, driving up prices, and residential consumers are paying for it". However it neglects that most of the power usage is caused by the same residential users, who are getting something out of it. 80–90% of AI energy usage is estimated for inference (eg. generating responses on chatgpt), not training[1]. Moreover despite AI companies being unprofitable as a whole, they're making fat margins on inference[2]. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that most of AI electricity consumption that the video complains about is as a result of ordinary people using AI. Taking this into account, blaming AI companies for jacking up electricity prices in this context makes as much sense as blaming airlines for jacking up oil prices. They're only doing so because people are buying their services, and presumably deriving some sort of utility from it.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

[2] https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re...

You are not taking into account the fact that data centers tend to be pretty concentrated geographically.

If I live in an area that is trying to attract data centers by giving them sweetheart deals, my electricity bill is going to go up by more than my share in inference usage since those data centers will be used by people all over the globe.

Many, people, probably most, are not using any inference in their lives - certainly not willingly or knowingly.