Executives from some of the largest tech and utility companies seemed to come to CERAWeek with a shared mission: change the narrative that data centers will spike U.S. electricity bills.
Throughout the week in Houston, leaders from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Duke Energy, and NextEra Energy all argued that building gigawatt-scale data centers to power artificial intelligence could actually drive down overall system costs, if hyperscalers deliver on their promise to bring their own power and pay for grid upgrades.
“The hyperscalers have come together with the power infrastructure developers like NextEra to make sure we’re both moving together in unison as partners and that we’re not inadvertently shifting costs on the customer,” John Ketchum, president and CEO at NextEra, said onstage alongside Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer at Google.
Duke Energy CEO Harry Sideris said the utility has set rates for large data center customers high enough to cover all the grid investments needed to serve them.
“So the broader base of customers are not subsidizing this,” Sideris said, adding that Duke has calculated that a 15-year contract with a one-gigawatt data center could save customers $1 billion. That contract is designed so the data center “covers its expenses and then some,” he said.
A spokesman for Duke Energy told Latitude Media that the figure is based on a cost-of-service study using the rate structure in North Carolina.
The message lands at an inflection point for the future of both artificial intelligence, and the infrastructure required to power it. U.S. public opinion of both is low. Half of U.S. adults said the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, up from 37% in 2021, according to a June 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center. Local communities are increasingly opposed to AI data centers, citing concerns about their voracious energy demands, impact on electricity prices, noise pollution, and other environmental impacts.
For the tech giants and utilities looking to make money from the AI boom, shifting that perception is critical. There’s growing urgency to build new energy infrastructure to serve data centers, and energy has become the main bottleneck constraining AI advancement.
BloombergNEF estimated that power demand from U.S. data centers will grow to 106 GW by 2035, although it’s unclear how much of that will ultimately come online, given long load queues and permitting delays.
Special tariffs for data centers
There is evidence that electricity prices are going up in PJM specifically due to data centers. A burst of development in the country’s largest electricity market led to a 56% increase in wholesale electricity prices last year, to $80.5 billion, according to the region’s independent market monitor.
That mostly isn’t the case in other regions of the country — at least yet. Between 2021 and 2024, research by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that load growth was actually linked with lower rates. This was because fixed costs, such as grid hardening, were spread out over more customers.
“That is history. That is up to today,” Porat said about that research, which emphasized that past electricity rate impacts are not necessarily predictive of what will happen with future load growth. “We want to make sure we’re doing additional work and investments, things like adding capacity and protecting affordability.”
Hyperscalers signed the White House “ratepayer protection pledge” this month, although President Donald Trump himself acknowledged that the deal was largely about public perception. “They need some PR help because people think that if a data center goes in there, electricity prices are going to go up,” he said at the signing.
What customers pay for electricity is largely decided by utilities and state energy regulators. As recent Latitude Intelligence research summarizes, at least 25 utilities now have special tariffs for data centers designed to protect ratepayers from risks, such as building new generation for a load that doesn’t show up. Still, those don’t cover most of the country.
A Duke case study
Duke is among the utilities with special tariffs for data centers. As Sideris outlined at CERAWeek, the utility has contracted nearly 5 GW of data center demand and is building 14 GW of generation — mostly gas but also solar and battery storage.
“What we’re focused on at Duke is electric service agreements, which are commitments from these hyperscalers that they’re going to provide the revenue,” Sideris said. “When they’re signing these contracts, they are tied to a minimum take of 75% of their nameplate capacity for 15 years. We’re doing that to protect our customers, but also to make sure that they are committed to building these things.”
Duke is seeking a 15% to 18% rate increase in the Carolinas for residential customers starting in 2027. Electric bills in the state have already increased about 22% since 2020, a state task force report found.
Jeff Brooks, a spokesman for the utility, told Latitude Media that the rate increase isn’t related to data centers. Duke added 150,000 customers in North Carolina the last two years, primarily residential and commercial. That required tens of thousands of new poles and miles of wires. Duke is also investing in hardening the grid against storms.
“We still only have about 1% of our total demand for electricity from data centers right now,” Brooks said, adding that by 2030 it will be about 10%.
Brooks said over a 15-year contract, data centers will contribute such a large investment in the overall system that it’ll keep costs lower for other customers.
“That doesn’t mean bills are necessarily going to go down,” Brooks added. “We don’t know where they’re going to go, because that depends on other factors. The day-to-day costs of maintaining the system, fuel costs. The point I’m getting at, though, is that the money the data center brings in will keep costs lower for customers than they would be otherwise.”
