From the White House to the statehouse, many US politicians who’ve been cheerleading the data-centre boom are now trying to defuse a growing backlash ahead of midterm elections. But the plan they’ve hit on isn’t winning over the skeptics.
President Donald Trump and state governors like Pennsylvania Democrat Josh Shapiro are pushing the power-hungry AI facilities to buy or generate their own electricity. That’s meant to assuage concern among voters about rising utility bills. It might just be giving them something else to worry about instead.
Take the giant construction site at Homer City, 50 miles (80 kilometres) east of Pittsburgh. The $12 billion development is the kind of project advocated by both Trump and Shapiro, a potential presidential candidate in 2028. What was the site of the largest coal-burning plant in Pennsylvania is being redeveloped into one of the biggest natural gas plants under construction in the US, to power a roughly 1,000-acre data centre campus and plenty more.
Even so, there’s pushback. Many people don’t want to live near data centres, aren’t convinced they’ll provide much lasting employment, and fret that the AI bots housed within them will turn out to be job-killers. Now there are polluting emissions from on-site power plants to add to the list.
It’s one illustration of the broader wave of public opposition that threatens to delay or scuttle AI projects, even as they’ve become crucial to a US economic outlook now clouded by the Middle East war.
The biggest data-centre operators have lined up hundreds of billions of dollars in capital spending this year. But some local governments have moved to block large data centres, and there are bills in a dozen states to impose temporary moratoriums, according to research firm ClearView Energy Partners. Maine became the first state to pass a ban on large data-centre construction this week.
Analysts project that electricity prices will likely continue to rise faster than overall inflation, driven at least in part by surging AI demand — and doubt that the bring-your-own-power plan will defuse the opposition.
“I don’t think that’s just going to magically solve the local concerns about data centres,” says Corey Young, director of the Center for Energy and the Built Environment at Washington & Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, who’s worked with local governments on energy issues.
Trump and Shapiro are among the leaders hoping it’ll solve at least some of them.
The president has championed AI. But faced with growing concerns about affordability — especially since power prices became a hot-button issue in November’s state elections — Trump has touted the bring-your-own approach. He hosted executives from a slew of tech giants, including Meta Platforms Inc and Microsoft Corp, and got them to sign non-binding pledges to secure electricity for their data centres.
Shapiro has also been rowing back a bit. Last June, hailing an Amazon.com Inc plan for $20 billion worth of data-centre campuses, he said “the future of AI runs right through Pennsylvania.” This year, acknowledging some opposition, he announced the “Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development standards,” including requirements that projects must bring or fully fund their own power generation and protect water resources.
“I know Pennsylvanians have real concerns about these data centres and the impact they could have on our communities, our utility bills, and our environment,” he said in his February 3 budget address. “And so do I.”
At Homer City, which could eventually have one of the biggest data-centre campuses in Pennsylvania and perhaps the whole country, building is well underway.
The 3,200-acre site — where demolition of the old power plant, with smokestacks and cooling towers that were a local landmark, began about a year ago — is bustling with more than 1,000 construction workers. Homer City Redevelopment and Kiewit Power Constructors Co have removed 93,000 tons of material from demolition of the old plant, and they erected the first steel for the new facility recently.
Talks are in progress with potential customers like data centres or advanced manufacturers who would build on the site, says Chief Executive Officer Corey Hessen. A new treatment facility is being built for the cooling water they’ll need. As for power, the goal is to hook up the first two of seven GE Vernova turbines to the grid in the second quarter of 2028. The plant will provide about 3,700 megawatts to the energy campus — substantially more than the peak load last year for the entire Pittsburgh area — and still have some 800 megawatts to spare for the local grid, enough to power 800,000 homes, Hessen says.
“We’re bringing our own power and then some,” he says. “That, I think, meets the expectations of the national and the state and the local communities of what this project can and should be.”
There’s local backing for the project because this corner of western Pennsylvania has been desperate to attract jobs lost when the coal mines closed and manufacturers left, says Homer City Borough Mayor Kyle Cobaugh.
“I think it is going to be good for our area,” Cobaugh says. “It’s going to bring in the hopefully right people, the right jobs and help re-stimulate our area.” A study by industry groups argues that Pennsylvania data centres will add $12 billion in annual economic output and support almost 20,000 jobs by 2036.
Across Pennsylvania, though, a Quinnipiac University poll in February found that 68 per cent of voters would oppose having a data centre in their community. The environmental group PennFuture has called for a statewide moratorium until stricter regulations are adopted. It’s also one of the groups appealing the commonwealth’s approval of an air permit for the Homer City natural gas plant.
Concerned Residents of Western PA is another group fighting the project — imploring local officials to revoke permits and enact a moratorium on data center development because of concerns about emissions and pollution.
“Given the scale of negative impacts we will experience, we must act now,” Indiana County resident Susan Comfort told county commissioners at a March 25 meeting.
While some of those impacts only affect people living near the projects, higher power prices hit more broadly. Households have already gotten squeezed. In Pennsylvania, the average monthly bill has climbed by about 30 per cent since 2020, to between $150 and $160, according to the state’s Office of Consumer Advocate.
There are other reasons besides data centres. Still, the giant grid operator PJM, which handles wholesale markets in Pennsylvania and a dozen other states — covering almost one-fifth of the US population — has been challenged by the takeoff of AI and resulting spike in power demand. At three auctions held since mid-2024 to pay generators to be maintained and ready to serve, the cost soared by more than $23 billion because of data centres alone, which accounted for 49 per cent of the total supply procured. That’s effectively baking in more hikes to consumer bills.
Goldman Sachs analysts expect data centers to account for about 40 per cent of overall US power demand growth over the next five years. That will likely keep electricity inflation at around 6 per cent through at least 2027, and it could go higher if the AI companies don’t help out enough with the needed capacity boost, they wrote.
Plans like the ones backed by Trump and Shapiro aim to ensure that they do. While there are doubts about how it’ll work in practice, many tech firms say they’re on board with the idea, partly because having their own electricity sources can help accelerate projects.
What’s known as “speed to power” in the industry jargon is becoming a decisive factor for data centres. It can take three years or longer to connect to the grid in many parts of the country, said Holly Lahd, a managing director at consultant CBRE Energy.
By contrast, it took Elon Musk’s xAI just 122 days to develop its Colossus data centre in Tennessee, using portable gas generators. But that project has triggered complaints about pollution, legal challenges to the permitting process, and a probe by Senate Democrats.
At some data centers, developers are bringing their own power by building on-site power generation that's completely off the electricity grid, unlike the Homer City project. A drawback of that model is that it narrows the customer base for local grids, leaving them short of cash to invest in aging systems, according to Jigar Shah at advisory firm Multiplier, who was a senior energy official in the Biden administration. “You end up with something more rickety that has more outages,” he says.
While access to power has been the biggest roadblock for data-centre investors, NIMBYism is swiftly moving up to No 2, says S&P Global analyst Brian Partridge. He expects about one-fourth of all US data centres built by 2030 will have on-site power, and is tracking some 130 gigawatts of such projects – roughly equal 10 per cent of current US generating capacity – though he cautions that 30 gigawatts are likely mere “dreams.”
If that estimate is correct, it leaves a lot of data centres that won’t be generating their own power. And beyond AI there are other pressures pointing to higher prices, on both the supply and demand side, like the electrification of transportation and home heating, or the fragmentation of US grids. At a couple of recent energy finance conferences, bankers worried aloud that surging data-centre demand will pressure household bills and shift the economics of new projects.
All this means that “bring your own” plans won’t address the root problem of stopping the rise in electricity prices, according to Michael Thomas, founder of energy data company Cleanview.
“If that’s the only thing that we do,” he says, “you’re going to have a lot of angry people in two years who say, ‘Hey, my electricity bill is 25 per cent, 50 per cent higher.’”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
Published on April 16, 2026