Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced Wednesday that it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint.
Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to “estimate and cover” consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid.
In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: “building AI responsibly can’t stop at the technology — it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it.”
“We’ve been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans," he said. "We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right.”
As one of America’s leading AI companies, Anthropic is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars building data centers to train and run its AI systems. These data centers require vast amounts of energy to power computing chips, cooling equipment and other IT systems.
In many locations, the price charged for electricity increases for everyone if new demand outpaces the development of new power supply.
Electricity rates appear to have skyrocketed in regions with intense data-center activity over the past year, though recent industry-sponsored analyses find more mixed impacts of data centers on electricity prices.
Upgrading electrical grids to compensate for new electricity production and delivery is also time-consuming and expensive. Intricate planning studies and new hardware, like transmission lines and substations, are required to ensure existing grids can effectively handle and allocate the gigawatts of electricity required by the data-center surge.
“The country needs to build new data centers quickly to maintain its competitiveness on AI and national security, but AI companies shouldn’t leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post announcing the commitment.
Anthropic also announced Wednesday that it would invest in new power generation capacity and systems that limit data centers’ energy usage during periods of highest electricity demands, which would help rates remain low for consumers.
With this announcement, Anthropic joins rivals OpenAI and Microsoft in pledging to reduce the cost impacts of its data centers amid mounting political pressure on AI companies and data center operators. On Friday, state senators in New York introduced a new bill that would pause issuing permits for new data centers and require a state commission to minimize the impact of data centers on electricity and gas rates.
In mid-January, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and several other Democrats introduced a bill that would require AI corporations to pay for the electricity costs of data-center expansion and relevant grid infrastructure.
Also last month, the White House appealed directly to power grid operators in the data-center-dense Mid-Atlantic region to slow the rise of electricity prices for consumers. The Trump administration is reportedly drafting a voluntary agreement that would commit America’s largest AI companies to offset spikes in household electricity prices.
According to a 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, data centers used roughly 4.4% of America’s electrical power, but that could surge to 12% by 2028. Experts from Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University found this surge in demand could increase electricity generation prices by roughly 25% in certain markets with many data centers by 2030.
