Anthropic is following in the footsteps of Microsoft and OpenAI, promising that it will “pay 100% of grid upgrade costs, work to bring new power online, and invest in systems to reduce grid strain.” The company made this announcement in its blog, saying that even though the US AI sector would need at least 50 gigawatts in the coming years, it “shouldn’t leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab.”
The AI infrastructure build-out has hit the average American hard, especially as the data centers’ demand for more and more power has caused wholesale electricity prices to go up by 267% in just five years in some places. Aside from the spike in demand pushing up prices, this increase is also driven by the need of power and distribution companies to upgrade the grid to accommodate the additional demand put on it by AI servers. These institutions then pass on their capital costs to the consumer, resulting in massively increased electricity costs.
It has gotten so bad that politicians from both sides of the aisle have started to take notice. Three Democratic U.S. senators have sent demand letters to Amazon, Google, Meta, and other AI hyperscalers, asking for an explanation on the situation. President Donald Trump also said that these companies should “pay their own way” in electricity consumption.
On the same day as Trump’s announcement, Microsoft released a statement promising to “be a good neighbor” to the communities near its data centers and releasing its “Community-First AI Infrastructure” framework to reassure the people that it will leave a long-lasting positive impact on the people surrounding them. OpenAI followed suit a little over a week later, saying that it will fund grid upgrades and have flexible loads to reduce the stress on the energy supply.
Power is the biggest constraint that many AI companies are facing in the U.S. right now. Unlike China, which has an abundance of power for the numerous AI data centers being built within its borders, the U.S. is already near or at capacity. This means that data centers cannot get the electricity needed to run their power-hungry chips, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella even saying that it does not have enough electricity to run all the AI GPUs in its inventory.
Many AI companies are looking at other power sources to solve this problem, but the solution seems to be several years away. These include small modular reactors, with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and more investing billions of dollars into the research and development of this technology. Microsoft is even looking at superconductors to reduce energy loss during transmission, while Elon Musk is envisioning an orbiting AI data center. The billionaire has even started to make his move on this, merging SpaceX with xAI and formalizing his plan for the million-satellite Orbital Data Center System with the FCC.
But even as Anthropic promises that it won’t burden the American consumer for its electricity demands, it also said that the government needs to do its part. It said that affordable power requires “systemic change” and that permitting, transmission development, and grid interconnection need to be faster and cheaper “to bring new energy online for everyone.”
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