Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley sent a joint letter Thursday demanding the Energy Information Administration collect "comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures" from data centers. The bipartisan push reflects growing voter anxiety about AI infrastructure driving up electricity costs—concerns that influenced midterm elections in Virginia and Georgia, where massive data center buildouts are concentrated.
The timing isn't coincidental. As AI workloads explode, data centers are becoming the new coal plants in terms of grid impact. But here's the problem: nobody actually knows how much power these facilities consume because the data is considered proprietary business information. No federal agency tracks it systematically, and utilities get gamed by data center operators shopping around between regions, leading to phantom demand forecasts inflated by 3-5x according to Vistra's CEO.
The senators are asking for transparency that doesn't exist because the industry doesn't want it to exist. Data centers increasingly install "behind-the-meter" power generation to avoid grid scrutiny entirely. Meanwhile, Trump's recent tech executive meeting produced a toothless pledge for companies to "pay for their own power"—which they're already trying to do to avoid exactly this kind of regulatory attention.
For AI builders, this matters because power costs and availability are becoming the bottleneck for model training and deployment. If regulators start demanding real energy accounting, expect hosting costs to rise and some providers to struggle with compliance. The wild west days of unlimited compute may be ending.