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...

Very anecdotal, but a friend of mine works for a fuel cell company that basically converts natural gas and/or propane to grid electricity a huge part of their work right now is powering new datacenters for AI growth. I don't really know the technology, so I may have the details wrong, but the fact companies willing to take on cost and complexity does hint towards real limits on energy supply.

> 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.

I'm not sure if "blame" and "jacking up" are the right words here. AI technology is demanding power quicker than it is being added to the grid and add so there is going to be tension. Now if tech companies start buying the grid operators and power, I'm more inclined to start blaming the tech companies themselves, but for now I still place broad energy failures squarely with the government.