If you live near an AI data center, you may already be seeing higher electricity bills. But if that data center is for Anthropic, the AI company now says it will cover the price hikes consumers face.
The data center boom unfolding across the U.S. is driving up electricity costs and adding more stress to the power grid. That added demand means the need for new sources of power, not to mention serious upgrades to the existing grid.
In many places, rising costs are being passed on directly to community members. But more and more legislators and even tech executives are raising the idea that the companies behind the data centers should foot the bill.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot, is the latest company to join that mindset.
“We’ve been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans,” Dario Amodei, Anthropic founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the [Trump administration] to get this right.”
How will this actually work?
As it invests in more AI infrastructure, Anthropic says it “will cover electricity price increases that consumers face from our data centers,” per a post to its website this week. “[AI] companies shouldn’t leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab.”
Data centers can cause electricity prices to spike because they drive up demand and often require costly infrastructure upgrades. Anthropic says it will address both factors, first by “covering 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electric charges.”
That could include things like new or upgraded transmission lines, substations, or generally any supporting infrastructure needed for its data centers.
Anthropic also says it will develop new sources of power to add supply to the growing electricity demand, work with utilities to cover the price impacts where new power isn’t being generated yet, and reduce strain on the grid during peak demand times through optimization tools.
Where Anthropic leases capacity from already-existing data centers, it says it’s exploring further ways to address the company’s workload’s effect on prices, adding that it supports federal policies that make it cheaper and quicker to bring new energy sources online.
When asked if there’s a limit to what Anthropic will cover, a spokesperson told Fast Company that the company’s commitment extends to any “grid upgrades or development of new energy sources that would otherwise be passed on to ratepayers—provided that our data center causes these costs, and that they’re necessary to serve our data centers.”
AI data centers are causing a natural gas surge
Many companies are building new power sources to match their growing electricity needs. That can hike ratepayers’ bills because utilities can raise rates as a way to recover the costs of building new power plants.
But beyond that initial investment, the type of power generation that gets built also matters—for both ratepayers’ bills and the planet.
Primarily, data centers are leading to a surge in new natural gas power plants. For example, to power a massive data center for Facebook parent company Meta Platforms in Louisiana, the local utility company proposed building three new natural gas power plants.
Meta isn’t alone. Proposals for new natural gas plants in the U.S. tripled in 2025 compared to the year prior, according to nonprofit research organization Global Energy Monitor. The U.S. now has the most gas-fired power capacity in development (that includes projects that have been announced as well as those in preconstruction and/or construction), the nonprofit says—with more than a third of that capacity slated to directly power data centers.
That’s bad for the environment: While not as environmentally harmful as coal, natural gas still comes with a lot of CO2 and methane emissions, which warm the planet. It’s also not necessarily great for ratepayers, because natural gas is “a famously volatile commodity,” as the World Resources Institute puts it. It’s vulnerable to huge price swings, and it’s frequently linked to rising electricity prices.
In October 2025, natural gas prices were up 45% compared to the year prior, according to the U.S. Energy and Information Administration, and are expected to go up another 16% within the year. Renewables like wind and solar, on the other hand, are the cheapest source of new power generation.
Can promises from Big Tech be enforced?
In a July 2025 post, Anthropic said that it will accelerate geothermal, natural gas, and nuclear permitting for AI data centers. But it’s not clear how many natural gas plants are in the works to power the company’s data centers, or whether its promise to cover electricity hikes includes the price volatility of natural gas in the new plants it brings online—in addition to the costs that come with recovering construction expenses.
Anthropic’s most recent announcement says it will “work to bring net-new power generation online to match our data centers’ electricity needs. Where new generation isn’t online, we’ll work with utilities and external experts to estimate and cover demand-driven price effects from our data centers.”
When asked whether Anthropic is planning to build more natural gas capacity specifically, whether it has plans to add renewable power, and whether price hikes from using more natural gas in the power generation the company adds will also be covered, a spokesperson said Anthropic doesn’t have “anything new to share at this time.”
When asked if there’s a timeline to Anthropic’s commitment, the spokesperson said there is no end date, and the commitments apply to any data centers it build in the U.S.
“We have more to do, and we’ll continue to share updates as this work develops,” the spokesperson said.
Anthropic is not the only company that has said it would foot the power bills for its data centers: Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others have made similar promises. But as CNN pointed out, companies have shared scant details on exactly how they’ll carry out those plans, and there’s not much in terms of regulation to enforce them, either.
“Big Tech companies are finally beginning to acknowledge that their data centers are saddling consumers with higher electricity costs and straining our power grid—but they still refuse to take full responsibility for these problems they are creating,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said in a statement to CNN.
The statement was in response to letters tech companies had sent to Senate Democrats regarding an investigation into how data centers are impacting electricity prices. “Without action from Congress,” Van Hollen added, “[the companies] will continue to evade accountability.”
