What AI data centers are doing to your electric bill
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What are the economic implications of building data centers?
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Earlier this month, I visited Ken and Carol Apaki. They live in a little town outside Columbus, Ohio.
They're retired now.
Carol worked in curriculum development. Ken was an engineer. And according to Carol, Ken still has an engineer's way of keeping track of things. Everything, everything ends up in a spreadsheet.
He had the grandkids. What was it when you had them do a chart, all of our grandkids? Their height? Oh, yeah, their height, how much they grew from year to year. Because he's been measuring. We've got a big board.
We've got a board with everybody's measurements on there for 20 years.
All 13 grandkids, their height by year, in a spreadsheet on their computer.
Oh, yeah. Can I see it? I think I can find it. See if you can find it.
Oh, no, you don't. I do. Really? Not only was there a spreadsheet, there was a graph of the growth curve of each kid. That is your grandson's Jalen's... Growth history. Growth history. And it looks like he's about 6'2 now? Yeah.
Yep.
On another spreadsheet on his computer, Ken had tracked the growth of a different number, their electric bill. And it was really this spreadsheet I had come to see.
And here's my spreadsheet. And so here we start back in July of 2020.
Every month for the last five years, Ken has recorded how much electricity he and Carol used and how much they had to pay their utility company, AEP Ohio. Like a lot of people around the country, Ken and Carol's electricity prices, what they are paying per kilowatt hour, that has been going way up.
And so my charge is around 11 cents.
That's your 2020 charge, right?
Yeah, in 2020. And down here in 2025, it's 19. So it's nearly doubled. Yeah.
In five years.
Yeah.
Do we know why?
I don't know why. Because AEP Ohio charged me that.
Ken doesn't know, but he does have a theory. His theory has to do with all the physical stuff that is being built to create our new AI future.
The data centers we're aware of came about 2020. And then it's gone from there to data centers all around.
130 data centers. in central Ohio here. I mean, that is amazing.
And so you, in your mind, you are making the connection between these data centers showing up and this price increase in your electricity bill.
Well, they are telling us, your rates are going to increase. I mean, that's what we're hearing in the news and all, that this is, you know, they don't have enough power.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Keith Romer. And I'm Jeff Guo.
How are electricity prices affected by data centers?
With tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, data centers have kind of become the thing in the U.S. economy. We are spending more to build data centers than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system.
But along with that growth has come questions about where all the electricity to run those incredibly power hungry data centers is supposed to come from. Today on the show, data centers and electricity. What all the AI investment might mean for all of our electricity bills. And what, if anything, we can do about it.
So investment in data centers has been this giant economic story. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars expected to add up to trillions over the next five years.
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