An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.
A typical new one runs 100 to 1,000 megawatts — a load equal to a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes, around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.
That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?
There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.
We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.
This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.
Greg Abbott gave away $3.2 billion and put the bill on the grid
Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.
Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.
What he gave them:
- A sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost $3.2 billion in forgone sales-tax revenue over two years — already one of the state's costliest incentive programs, and soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation.
- A regulatory door held open. ERCOT expects Texas power demand to nearly double by 2030, with large-load projects wanting up to 56,458 more megawatts queued for its approval. Texas now has more data centers under construction than any other state — 142, against Virginia's 141.
What Texans got:
- The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push wholesale electricity prices at ERCOT's North hub roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
- A $33 billion transmission build-out — ERCOT's own estimate for its 765-kV expansion plan — that shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers.
And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started saying data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers."
He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.
Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike
Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:
- Tampa Electric: up 86%
- Duke Energy: up 49%
- Florida Power & Light: up 45%
Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General for six years, until January 2025 — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.
She never did it. Not once.
That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.
A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.
Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.
Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays
Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.
Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.
Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.
His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.
And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.
The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.
Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax
Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.
At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.
He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.
Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.
At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.
Gregg Hull's answer for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste
New Mexico is drying up. At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, faced a flurry of questions about whether he supports a moratorium on data centers. He said he is not opposed to them. What the state should explore instead, he said, is requiring developers to cool their servers with alternative water — brackish water, or produced water from oil and gas operations.
"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries. Every time we tell an industry that we don't want them here or we push them out of the state without coming up with a way that we can actually work with those industries, we're sending a message out to the rest of the United States that we don't want those opportunities here."
Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.
That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.
Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules so water can be safely treated and reused only within the industry while protecting our freshwater resources." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.
So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't back a pause on data centers, and an answer that points them at the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste streamlined.
The pattern
Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.
The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.2 billion in Abbott's giveaways.
And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.
None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.
The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.
You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.
Sources
The build-out. The scale of a single facility is EPRI's, from Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary, updated Feb. 25, 2026: "A typical new data center of 100 to 1000 megawatts represents a load equal to that of a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes."
Texas. The 2021 blackout death toll is from Andrew Weber and Mose Buchele, "Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known," KUT via Texas Standard, Aug. 5, 2022 — the state's official count is 246, which researchers call a severe undercount. Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan, "Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break," Texas Tribune, April 8, 2026 — the comptroller's $3.2 billion two-year estimate, the tax break as "soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation," and the 142-to-141 count of data centers under construction against Virginia's. The interconnection queue and ERCOT's demand forecast are from Kayla Guo, "Data centers are booming in Texas. What does that mean for the grid?" Texas Tribune, Jan. 24, 2025. The price forecast is Robert Walton, "Data center demand spike could drive 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027: EIA," Utility Dive, March 16, 2026 — EIA's 78.9% is for the ERCOT North hub under a high-demand scenario. ERCOT's $32.99 billion estimate for its 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan is reported in Paige Feild, "Permian Basin Power Fix Becomes $33 Billion Statewide Project," Texas Scorecard, Oct. 28, 2025. Abbott's directive to the PUC and ERCOT: Sarah Davis, "Abbott seeks new limits on Texas data centers," The Hill, June 11, 2026. The "epicenter of AI development" quote and the $40 billion Google announcement are from the governor's own press release.
Florida. Mitch Perry, "Florida's GOP AGs used to intervene in utility rate cases, but no longer," Florida Phoenix, June 17, 2026 — the Tampa Electric, Duke and FPL increases from December 2020 to January 2026 (Food & Water Watch), Moody's $431,000 in career money from the investor-owned utilities (CLEO Institute), her lead among Senate candidates in electric-utility fundraising (OpenSecrets), and the McCollum and Crist rate-case interventions. On SB 484: Samantha Putterman, "Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed," PolitiFact, Aug. 7, 2026.
Ohio. Bonnie Lucas, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy PACs as bills soar," TiffinOhio.net, Aug. 6, 2026 — the $97,468.91 total, the $65,603.24 that arrived after the Energy and Policy Institute flagged the giving, the July 31 checks, the governor's five PUCO appointments, Ohio's 53% rise in electricity bills since 2021, and AEP Ohio Power's 15% disconnection rate, first reported by Canary Media.
Georgia. Ross Williams, "Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 5, 2026 — the luncheon, the property-tax proposal, the Medicaid answer and Jackson's stake in a Texas data center. His net worth is from Forbes. The 566,000 projection is the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of health care cuts.
New Mexico. Joshua Bowling, "NM GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull touts experience leading, growing Rio Rancho," Source New Mexico, May 12, 2026, reporting the Albuquerque Journal town hall of May 11. On produced water, the Western Environmental Law Center's releases of May 14, 2025 and May 12, 2026. Hull's regulatory position is from his own campaign site.
