The Energy Information Administration is expanding its pilot data center energy surveys to three more states before rolling out the first mandatory nationwide assessment of data center electricity use. The move, confirmed in an April 9 letter to senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, targets 196 companies across Texas, Washington state, and Northern Virginia-DC corridor in the current pilot, asking for detailed reporting on electricity consumption, cooling systems, server metrics, and energy sources.
This represents the government's first serious attempt to get actual facility-level data instead of relying on industry estimates and modeling. As I wrote when Warren and Hawley first pushed for mandatory reporting in March, utilities and regulators are being asked to plan billion-dollar grid investments around AI demand growth they can't actually measure. The EIA questionnaire focuses on the metrics that matter most for grid planning: how much power comes directly from the grid versus on-site generation, where load concentrations are forming, and how AI workloads are changing consumption patterns.
The Federation of American Scientists argues the survey doesn't go far enough, calling for tracking of water use and emissions beyond just electricity. Meanwhile, the timeline remains vague—the EIA told WIRED it has "no specifics to share" about when mandatory reporting would actually begin, only that pilot work should finish by late September. Warren's statement that "people are hurting right now" and pushing for faster data collection reflects growing ratepayer concerns about who pays for AI infrastructure buildouts.
For developers and AI companies, this signals the end of the era where data center energy use stayed proprietary. Mandatory reporting will likely expose which regions face the biggest capacity constraints and could influence where new AI infrastructure gets built—or whether it gets built at all.