Gasoline prices have nearly doubled nationwide over the last month, as President Donald Trump’s war with Iran continues. As a result, many consumer staples that rely on diesel-fueled trucks to reach store shelves are also rising in cost. And food prices are climbing especially quickly, in part due to a logjam of global fertilizer supply — nearly a third of which depends on the Strait of Hormuz for transit to farmers worldwide.

The situation is remarkable, given the president’s many years of bold claims and arrogant pledges of dirt-cheap fossil fuels, lower energy prices and shrinking inflation — to say nothing of his supposed allegiance to a populist “America first” doctrine. Yet, energy prices in many areas of the country were already skyrocketing long before the conflict with Iran. The driver of these inflated electric bills hasn’t been the Middle East conflict and Big Oil. It’s been AI data centers and Big Tech.

Indeed, the nation’s recent boom in hyperscale data center construction, driven by the massive demand for computing power from the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries, is dramatically reshaping communities around the country and starkly reorienting Americans’ budgets, and not for the better.

Last year, as a sudden wave of hyperscale AI data center construction started to overwhelm local leaders in dozens of states, we at Food & Water Watch began looking closely at the environmental, consumer and community effects of these massive industrial facilities. What we discovered was alarming.

Energy demand from AI data centers in the United States is expected to increase up to threefold from 2020 to 2030. Our analysis found that these facilities could consume up to 580 terawatt-hours of energy annually, 12 percent of total national demand and the equivalent energy used by more than 55 million households. The largest of these massive hyperscale projects, which may house 5,000 or more computer servers over millions of square feet, could consume as much power as 2 million households.

This extreme surge in energy demand across the American grid is completely unsustainable, and is already having grave effects on the environment, climate and countless families’ finances. More than half the energy needed for AI data centers is produced by fossil fuels — the coal and fracked gas that are driving our ever-deepening climate crisis, producing stronger and more violent storms, raising our sea levels and slowly cooking our planet.

Additionally, hyperscale data centers require vast amounts of water to operate. By 2028, U.S. data centers could use as many as 720 billion gallons of water each year just to cool AI servers. This is equal to more than 1 million Olympic-size swimming pools, or enough water to meet the indoor needs of 18.5 million American households. All this as communities nationwide increasingly struggle to provide clean, affordable water supply for everyday use.

Speaking of affordability, the most direct effect of the AI data center boom is on Americans’ wallets. Driven largely by new data centers, surging power demand compelled U.S. electric and gas utilities to request $31 billion in consumer rate increases in 2025 — double the total request in 2024. Average residential electricity rates in the U.S. soared 31% from 2020 to 2025, compared to just 4% from 2015 to 2020. This cost crisis has only deepened in recent months.

It should come as no surprise that people and communities are fighting back. In October, Food & Water Watch became the first national organization to call for a full nationwide moratorium on new AI data center construction, citing the massive and growing burden on electricity and water resources. Months later, 250 additional local, state and national groups joined in our demand. Responding to the growing public outcry, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently introduced a bill to enact just such a moratorium.

Meanwhile, community leaders nationwide are taking matters into their own hands, rejecting scores of new AI data center proposals in recent months and pursuing multi-year local and statewide halts to the industry’s expansion.

Simply put, we need a nationwide pause on the explosive growth of new AI data center construction now, because it has yet to be determined if — not how — the industry can ever operate in a manner that sufficiently protects people and society from the profusion of inherent hazards and harms that data centers bring wherever they appear.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Mitch Jones is the managing director of policy and litigation at Food & Water Watch, a national environmental organization fighting for safe food, clean water and a livable climate. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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