announced Thursday that they are opening an investigation into “alarming reports that tech companies are passing on the costs of building and operating their data centers to ordinary Americans as AI data centers’ energy usage has caused residential electricity bills to skyrocket in nearby communities.” “City leaders are faced with significant challenges when data centers decide to locate in their communities, because the data centers themselves are so resource-intensive, both in terms of energy and water usage, it can be challenging for a municipality to actually evaluate and understand the full impacts of what permitting that data center in their community might be,” Walsh said. Walsh said Trump’s executive order “doesn’t do anything to prevent local communities from exercising their existing powers” to enact moratoriums on building new data centers in their jurisdictions. Local governments are beginning to push back. In November, the Board of Supervisors in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania, unanimously rejected a land application that would have enabled a data center campus. Phoenix and Portland, Oregon, have signed a global initiative to address the environmental and community impact of data centers in their communities. “AI and advanced computation have transformational potential, but communities need basic standards and transparency to ensure the infrastructure that supports them is developed in a way that benefits local residents,” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said in a statement. announcing the new website. The website furthers two core pillars of that initiative: making the U.S. the AI capital of the world and “advancing cooperative federalism,” according to the press release. In their letter to Congress, the environmental organizations stated that tripling the number of data centers in the next five years would require as much electricity as about 30 million households, as much water as about 18.5 million households and contribute to escalating electricity costs. Bloomberg reported in September that wholesale power costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., 10 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 06, ISSUE 12
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