Your electric bill has been going up. You may have just noticed recently, or you may have been tracking the increases over years, but one thing is for sure: Electricity is getting noticeably more expensive.
Of course, with any market as complex as the energy market, there are many causes for this rise. But here’s one we bet you didn’t think of: data centers. We’ve all heard of the AI boom and how we need more and more data centers to keep up. Well, the thing about data centers is that they use a lot of electricity (and water, it turns out).
No sweat, right? They use the electricity, they pay for it. Well… it’s not quite that simple. According to a recent analysis by Yale Climate Connections, the price that commercial and data centers are charged for electricity has started falling, even while they are driving more electricity demand than ever.