The bill comes due
Oregon’s Public Utility Commission gave data centers a rude little wake-up call: a 29% rate hike under the POWER Act. At the same time, regular households are getting a small break, with residential bills expected to drop by an average of 1.3%.
Why this matters
This is basically the utility version of “the group chat can’t keep subsidizing the one friend who orders the lobster.” Data centers use a ton of electricity, and states are getting less patient about letting that demand get passed along to everyone else.
Bigger than Oregon
For investors, this is another reminder that the AI boom has a very unsexy dependency: power. More server racks, more cooling, more strain on grids — and now, potentially, more political pressure to make big users pay their fair share.
Big picture: when the grid gets expensive, the cloud gets a little less magical.