Congress wants AI to help pay the power bill

New bill, same old electricity problem

Sen. Adam Schiff says the AI boom shouldn’t come with a giant shrug from the biggest tech companies. On Monday, he introduced the Energy Cost Fairness and Reliability Act, a proposal aimed at making the likes of Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle pay a bigger share of the power costs tied to their AI appetite.

Why this matters

AI isn’t just eating silicon for breakfast — it’s also gulping down electricity like it’s training for a crypto miner marathon. Lawmakers are increasingly worried that data centers are pushing up grid demand, and that ordinary households could end up subsidizing the glow-up of trillion-dollar tech firms.

Schiff’s pitch is basically: if your servers are turning the grid into a treadmill, you should probably pay for the extra sweat. That lines up with a broader political mood shift, where the AI buildout is starting to look less like a futuristic moonshot and more like a very expensive utility bill.

The bigger picture

This isn’t the first time the issue has come up. Elizabeth Warren recently warned that a single AI data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes, and earlier this year the Trump administration floated a voluntary pledge for companies to self-fund some of their grid needs. In other words: the power fight is no longer hypothetical, and the bill is starting to circulate.

For investors, the takeaway is simple: AI growth may still be hot, but the infrastructure behind it is getting politically messy. And when lawmakers start talking about cost allocation, somebody usually ends up paying more than they planned.

Big picture: the AI story is moving from “how fast can we scale?” to “who pays for the lights?”