The AI boom is gobbling up power faster than ever
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The AI boom is gobbling up power faster than ever
 By Hannah Beckler
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2026-06-07T09:00:01.265Z
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The data center boom is accelerating.
A Business Insider analysis of US data center permits reveals a staggering escalation in data center power use. Data centers across the US are growing in number and in size. If all data centers permitted through 2025 come online, they will use between 224.3 terawatt-hours and 358.8 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, an increase of 50% over the previous year across the range, Business Insider's analysis found.
At the midpoint, that's more than all the electricity used by any one US state in 2024, except Texas.
The vast majority of this power use is driven by hyperscale data centers, mammoth facilities that use 40 megawatts or more each, Business Insider estimates.
Tech giants have an insatiable appetite for more computing power to fund their AI ambitions. In 2025, permits were issued for 176 new data centers across 34 states — the most new permits in one year since the first was issued in 1976, Business Insider found. Many of them are mammoth facilities destined for rural areas — enormous complexes blanketing prairies, green spaces, and farmland.
Amazon's planned 14-building data center complex in Ridgeland, Mississippi, would transform nearly 800 acres of rural woodland. In the village of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Microsoft's nine data center buildings would command a collective footprint of over 5.2 million square feet built on a property nearly the size of New York City's Central Park, according to planning documents. And just outside Eagle Mountain, Utah, QTS — one of the nation's biggest data center operators — is building one that is expected to demand between 1.9 and 3 terawatt-hours a year once fully online, according to Business Insider's estimate. On average, that's the same amount of electricity used by 227,000 US homes.
The race by tech companies to reach ever-greater AI ambitions has sparked a sweeping backlash fromlocal residentsand state and local officials wary of data center impacts on the environment, economy, and communities. And development-friendly lawmakers could face a reckoning in this year's midterms, in which data centers are emerging as a key issue for many voters.
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'Digital roots in rural soil'
Kaitlyn Gruenbacher lives on a third-generation farm in Sedgwick County, Kansas. Farms quilt the vast majority of the state. From the window of her home, she can see a cattle pasture and her neighbor's tilled fields stretching far into the horizon.
Developers see something entirely different. Access to necessary infrastructure, cheap power, plentiful land, and available water make south-central Kansas attractive to prospectors looking for new data center sites. It's the perfect state, one academic wrote in a 2025 presentation at an economic forum, to set "digital roots in rural soil."
"They're going to take our finite resources," farmer Kaitlyn Gruenbacher said. "And what are we getting in return?"
Travis Heying for BI
Early this year, Gruenbacher learned that a developer had proposed a data center site across the road from her home. It had purchased or signed sale agreements for more than 300 acres, according to property records. Gruenbacher was first shocked, then furious. A data center like that would devastate her way of life, she told Business Insider.
The developer didn't respond to requests for comment.
The news exploded into Gruenbacher's community, she said. In fiery town halls, neighbors opposed the data center near Gruenbacher's property and two more proposed in nearby locations. As little as 30 feet below the soil, the Equus Beds Aquifer feeds crop irrigation and drinking water to residents across southcentral Kansas. Sedgwick County residentsfeared the data centers would threaten the fragile aquifer amid a yearslong drought, drive up electricity bills, jeopardize their health with noise and air pollution, and displace multigenerational farming families.
Data centers like those proposed in Kansas are extremely resource-intensive; some of the largest use up to several million gallons of water a day and as much electricity as a small city. Nationwide, their water and electricity draws have decreased neighbors' water pressure, strained electric grid systems, and increased reliance on heavily polluting fossil fuels, such as natural gas or, as in Nebraska, coal.States and local governments have also granted large tax exemptions to data center developers, some amounting to more than a billion dollars in forgone annual tax revenue. In Ohio, for example, a recently suspended state-level data center tax exemption totaled nearly $1.6 billion in lost tax revenue in 2025, the state reported.
Their expansion could also increase electricity costs, multiple analyses have shown. Utilities scrambling to meet data centers' skyrocketing power demands are investing billions of dollars in new grid infrastructure and power generation. Some utilities have recouped that cost by raising electricity prices for all their ratepayers, including residential customers.
A developer proposed a data center site across the road from Gruenbacher's home in Kansas.
Travis Heying for BI
At PJM Interconnection — which operates an electric grid serving 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC — data centers contributed to a 76% increase in wholesale power costs in the first quarter of 2026, compared to the year-earlier period, according to a May 2026 report by Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor.
"Customers are already bearing billions of dollars in higher costs as a direct result of existing and forecast data center load," the Monitoring Analytics report found.
PJM said it is working to establish new rules to integrate data centers without unfair impacts on consumers.
Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and other Big Tech companies pledged in late 2025 to pay their fair share for future grid investments needed to support their data centers, so residential customers wouldn't have to foot the bill.
Gruenbacher said she and her neighbors worry about the impact data centers could have on their land and their livelihoods. "They're going to take our finite resources," Gruenbacher said. "And what are we getting in return? Nothing."
Proponents of data centers say build-out is crucial for US economic growth, both for the country's AI advances to remain competitive on the world stage and for the number of jobs created in their construction. In Kansas, supporters see data centers as an opportunity to garner local tax revenue and high-wage construction jobs.Adeveloper of a 290-acre data center project in De Soto, Kansas, for example, agreed to pay more than $460,000 a year to the city in lieu of property taxes and, once operational,is expected topay a 3.75% franchise fee on all electricity used, amounting to an estimated $1.5 million in city revenue a year,according to a report commissioned by the Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning Department.
The AI arms race
Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are in an artificial-intelligence arms race. Collectively, they are set to spend over $600 billion in 2026, funneling most of that capital expenditure into even more data center build-out.
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