The Economist 2026-03-10-3
Americans' Electricity Bills Are Up. Don't Blame AI.
AI data centres are scapegoats for electricity price increases driven by decades of deferred grid infrastructure, transformer supply shortages, and fossil fuel dynamics. The real insight is buried: an industry bigwig admits AI provides utilities a pretext to win regulatory approval for capex they should have made years ago. The "blame the shiny new thing for costs that were always coming" pattern maps directly to enterprise IT budgets.