On Tuesday, Americans voted overwhelmingly against data centers and artificial intelligence growth. In 40 of 41 local ballot races around the country, many in the state of Ohio, voters opted to restrict or prohibit new data center constructions in their areas.
Much of the growing opposition to data centers has come from rising electricity prices, which are squeezing Americans in a time of already high prices and cost of living.
But, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, data centers are probably having only a small effect on residential electricity prices. The researchers calculated that these operations were responsible for just 4 percent of the utility rate increases over the last five years.
“Even to me it was somewhat surprising,” said Serguei Netessine, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors.
In the run-up to the elections, Democrats pointed to data centers — and Republican support for their development — as key drivers of electricity price increases. In one campaign ad, Democrat James Talarico, now senator-elect of Texas, said that Texans were “paying the price with skyrocketing utility bills.” Sherrod Brown, Democratic senator-elect of Ohio, similarly argued that state residents were facing higher electricity bills due to the build-out of energy-hogging data centers.
There are certainly some areas — like in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio and other states covered by grid operator PJM — where data centers have skyrocketed demand, pushing some costs onto residential customers.
But multiple studies by different researchers and organizations have failed to find a strong connection between data centers and the overall trajectory of U.S. electricity prices in recent years. Another analysis earlier this year by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that, between 2010 and 2024, data centers increased average electricity prices for residential customers by just 2.1 percent.
Last year, research from the Brattle Group and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that data centers were actually decreasing costs in certain regions. And another study by the Electric Power Research Institute found that a doubling of data center capacity between 2019 and 2024 resulted in a 4 percent drop in home electricity prices.
“Depending on which techniques you use, you can identify a slight increase or decrease in prices historically” due to data centers, said Ryan Hledik, principal at the Brattle Group. “None of these are the kind of earth-shattering rate impacts you hear about.”
The new Harvard and Penn study found a slightly higher impact on industrial electricity prices — the price paid by manufacturers and large facilities. For those customers, data centers were responsible for 15 percent of the price increase between 2020 and 2025. But for ordinary Americans, Netessine said, the changes simply were not substantial.
“So far we have no evidence that data centers increase prices all that much,” Netessine said. Instead, he said, prices are rising due to more quotidian factors: rising gas prices, an aging electricity grid, and wildfires and hurricanes requiring improvements to the grid and recovery after disaster.
Most of the cost of generating and delivering electricity is based on large, up-front capital costs, such as the costs to build power plants, wires and transmission lines to carry that power into homes. Some areas of the United States also have excess “capacity” in the grid — meaning that the grid is overbuilt for the actual demand. In those areas, adding a data center means that large fixed grid costs are spread over more consumers. That could lower prices.
Of course, that’s not the case everywhere. PJM has had booming data center growth that has also required additional build-out of the power grid. This has raised prices at power capacity auctions, and states like Maryland have seen increasing residential prices that are at least in part from this boom.
If the number of data centers continue to boom, experts say, residential prices could be affected more down the line. Data center electricity demand is expected to increase steeply over the next few years, requiring new power generation — wind, solar or natural gas — to be put onto the grid.
And residents have issues with data centers that go beyond the price of electricity. The new developments have been singled out for loud noise, polluting power generation, and for disturbing residential neighborhoods and natural landscapes. According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans say that data centers are mostly bad for the environment. Others feel that the AI race — which could ultimately leave many Americans out of work — is being forced upon them.
“I think generally what we’re seeing is a broader range of reasons the public has opposed data centers,” Hledik said. “Concern about AI leading to loss of jobs — all of that is getting packaged together.”
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