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... Higher wholesale prices had a downstream effect on energy consumers, the researchers said, as residential customers paid huge fractions of the spending on transmission built for data centers.

The study found that spending across the four power grids jumped from $2 billion in 2020 to $34.2 billion in 2025, with data centers responsible for $8.25 billion of energy infrastructure costs last year.

Residential users were responsible for just under $3.5 billion, but they were billed more than $16 billion while data centers were billed about $3 billion.

Researchers said that antiquated formulas used to allocate energy costs along a power grid have historically divided those costs based on previous energy consumption, rather than new growth. That means households take on much of the costs for developing new power infrastructure.

"It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem," said Fengqi You, one of the study's authors, in a statement. "Because if you're going to build a data center, you need to expand this power infrastructure. Otherwise, there's no electricity for them to run. But before they build, they're not using energy."

Residents of rural and lower-income areas saw their bills skyrocket, and in some cases faced increases in energy costs that were 76% larger than residents of urban communities, according to the study.

The researchers said that despite the concentration of data centers near metropolitan hubs, the financial loads they trigger often seep into surrounding suburban and rural areas because of policies that govern how energy costs are shared across regions. They argued that such policies warrant review. ...