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When Big Tech Comes to Town
By 2025, the world's largest technology companies command a combined market value of $21 trillion (1).
Companies like OpenAI and NVIDIA now strike deals worth tens of billions of dollars to build massive data centers across the United States.
Federal projections estimate these facilities will consume up to 12% of the nation's electricity by 2028, nearly triple their 2023 consumption of 4.4% (2).
This infrastructure boom promises to power the next generation of artificial intelligence. But in communities across the country, residents confront a different reality: soaring electricity bills, environmental degradation, and opaque decision-making that drastically impacts their lives.
In Tucson, Arizona, a 290-acre data center project called Project Blue has become the latest flashpoint about the expansion of AI infrastructure within city limits.
Beale Infrastructure, a subsidiary of asset manager Blue Owl, plans to build the facility for Amazon Web Services (3).
The project requires 286 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power approximately 200,000 homes – about the number of houses in the city of Tucson – with potential expansion to 600 megawatts across ten buildings (4, 5).
Hundreds of residents protested against the construction of the project. They cited concerns about water consumption in the desert climate and the strain on the local power grid. In August 2025, the Tucson City Council voted unanimously to deny the project's request to connect to the city's reclaimed water system (6).
Beale Infrastructure continued building anyway. The company purchased land in unincorporated Pima County, just outside Tucson's jurisdiction, and filed an energy agreement with state regulators to secure power from Tucson Electric Power (7).
The data center will draw on the same regional grid that serves Tucson residents, but city officials no longer have authority to regulate its construction or operations.
1200 miles away, in Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI built what it calls "the world's largest supercomputer" in just 122 days. The facility, named Colossus, houses more than 200,000 NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUS) that are used to train AI systems (8).
To meet Colossus's power demands, xAI installed 35 portable natural gas turbines that produce 421 megawatts of electricity, comparable to the output of a major power plant (9). The company avoided standard air quality permitting by classifying the turbines as "temporary," allowing them to operate for up to 364 consecutive days without regulatory approval (13).
The facility sits approximately two miles from Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood where residents already face elevated health risks. Decades of industrial pollution in the area have produced asthma rates above the state average and cancer risks that exceed EPA safety thresholds by a factor of four (10, 11).
Using satellite data from NASA and the European Space Agency, Researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville measured air quality changes after Colossus began operations last year. They found that average concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a pollutant that exacerbates asthma and other respiratory conditions, increased by 3% across the area. Peak NO2 levels have also surged by 79% in areas immediately surrounding the data center, and by 9% in Boxtown itself (14).
The Environmental Protection Agency has not intervened. Memphis Mayor Paul Young has allowed xAI to continue operations, and the company has purchased additional property nearby for expansion (12).
Directly across the Mississippi River from Colossus, Google announced plans for its own major data center in West Memphis, Arkansas. The $4 billion project represents the company's first facility in the state (17).
Google's proposal includes commitments that distinguish it from other data center projects. The company pledged to pay the full cost of electricity for the facility and to fund construction of a 600-megawatt solar plant paired with 350 megawatts of battery storage (15). Google also established a $25 million Energy Impact Fund to support energy efficiency programs for residents in surrounding communities (16).
Yet questions remain about whether these commitments address the facility's full impact. The data center's ultimate power consumption will likely exceed the 650 megawatts that Google plans to add through renewable sources. And, If Google later reduces operations or closes the facility, local ratepayers will continue paying for the expanded infrastructure built to serve it.
In October 2025, Just 13 months after breaking ground, Amazon opened an $11 billion data center complex in New Carlisle, Indiana. The facility runs exclusively Amazon's proprietary Trainium chips and primarily serves Anthropic, an AI research company that just secured a ‘strategic partnership’ with Amazon worth $8 billion(18).
When complete, the complex will span 30 buildings across 1,200 acres of former farmland. It will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity, which is enough to power 1.5 million homes, or more than half of all residential electricity consumption in Indiana (19). The site already operates approximately 500,000 AI chips, with a goal of reaching one million chips by the end of 2025.
Amazon expedited construction by bypassing municipal review processes, negotiating directly with the regional utility company Indiana Michigan Power. The state and local governments provided more than $8 billion in tax incentives over several decades to secure the project.
Indiana Michigan Power expects data center growth to more than double Indiana's peak electricity demand by 2030, from 2.8 gigawatts to over 7 gigawatts. Company filings indicate that natural gas plants will provide approximately three-quarters of this additional capacity.
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A Bloomberg News investigation analyzed wholesale electricity prices at tens of thousands of locations across the United States. In areas with significant data center activity, wholesale electricity costs increased by as much as 267% over five years. These wholesale costs flow directly into the retail prices that households and businesses pay.
During the same period, residential electricity demand remained flat or declined in many regions. The increases stem not from growing household consumption, but from the rapid expansion of data centers and the infrastructure required to power them.
The pattern repeats across the country. In Ohio, average household bills increased by at least $15 per month in summer 2025, with utility companies and grid operators citing data center growth as a primary driver.
The pattern repeats across the country. In Ohio, average household bills increased by at least $15 per month in summer 2025, with utility companies and grid operators citing data center growth as a primary driver.
The facilities profiled here represent a small fraction of the data centers under construction nationwide. The bill is just beginning to come due.