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Original: Simon Willison · 12/02/2026

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Summary

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. One of the sub-threads of the AI energy usage discourse has been the impact new data centers have on the cost of electricity to nearby residents. Here’s detailed analysis from Bloomberg in September reporting “Wholesale e

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Key Insights

“Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers.” — Highlighting the significant increase in electricity costs linked to data center operations.
“We will work to bring net-new power generation online to match our data centers’ electricity needs.” — Anthropic’s commitment to mitigating the impact of their data centers on electricity prices.
“I remain frustrated at the refusal of the major AI labs to fully quantify their energy usage.” — The author expresses frustration over the lack of transparency in energy consumption by AI labs.

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Topics

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Full Article

# Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
Author: Simon Willison
Published: 2026-02-12
Source: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/covering-electricity-price-increases/#atom-everything
Covering electricity price increases from our data centers One of the sub-threads of the AI energy usage discourse has been the impact new data centers have on the cost of electricity to nearby residents. Here’s detailed analysis from Bloomberg in September reporting “Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers”. Anthropic appear to be taking on this aspect of the problem directly, promising to cover 100% of necessary grid upgrade costs and also saying:
We will work to bring net-new power generation online to match our data centers’ electricity needs. Where new generation isn’t online, we’ll work with utilities and external experts to estimate and cover demand-driven price effects from our data centers.
I look forward to genuine energy industry experts picking this apart to judge if it will actually have the claimed impact on consumers. As always, I remain frustrated at the refusal of the major AI labs to fully quantify their energy usage. The best data we’ve had on this still comes from Mistral’s report last July and even that lacked key data such as the breakdown between energy usage for training vs inference.

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Key Takeaways

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Notable Quotes

Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers.
Context: Highlighting the significant increase in electricity costs linked to data center operations.
We will work to bring net-new power generation online to match our data centers’ electricity needs.
Context: Anthropic’s commitment to mitigating the impact of their data centers on electricity prices.
I remain frustrated at the refusal of the major AI labs to fully quantify their energy usage.
Context: The author expresses frustration over the lack of transparency in energy consumption by AI labs.
  • [[topics/energy-consumption]]
  • [[topics/corporate-responsibility]]
  • [[topics/ai-agents]]

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Originally published at https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/covering-electricity-price-increases/#atom-everything.