What AI data centers are doing to your electric bill
Planet Money
- Published
- December 20, 2025
- Duration
- 32:15
- Summary source
- description
- Last updated
- Jun 7, 2026
Discusses ai.
Summary
As a country, we are spending more to get data centers up and running than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system. (Yes, that’s inflation-adjusted.) With tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, data centers have kind of become the thing in the US economy. But along with that growth have come a lot of questions. Like …
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Show notes
As a country, we are spending more to get data centers up and running than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system. (Yes, that’s inflation-adjusted.) With tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, data centers have kind of become the thing in the US economy. But along with that growth have come a lot of questions. Like where is all the electricity to run these data centers supposed to come from? And how much are residential customers’ electric bills increasing
Themes
- ai