Senate probe: AI data centers push costs onto ratepayers, dodge job data
A nearly year-long Senate investigation finds Big Tech data center operators lean on NDAs and tax breaks while refusing to document how many permanent jobs their sites actually create.
What happened: Senators Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal closed a nearly year-long investigation into AI data centers with a report called "Power and Profits." It concludes that Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix are not covering the full cost of their facilities, are using nondisclosure agreements to limit what residents and local officials learn before projects are approved, and are collecting large tax breaks without documenting how many permanent jobs the sites actually produce.
Why it matters: Data centers draw enormous amounts of electricity, and grid upgrades meant to serve one facility often get folded into costs shared by every ratepayer in the area, including households with no stake in AI. The senators say companies resist paying for infrastructure triggered specifically by their presence, pushing those costs onto the general rate base, while lobbying state legislatures for better terms by threatening to build in a different state instead.
The secrecy playbook, plainly: Companies routinely ask utilities, landowners, and sometimes even government officials to sign NDAs, which the report says keeps communities from learning project details until decisions are effectively locked in. Meta told investigators confidentiality "increases efficiency" for stakeholders, a framing that leaves out local residents. Developers also publicize construction-phase job counts but withhold permanent-job figures. The few numbers that surfaced suggest roughly one ongoing job per megawatt of capacity, so a 100-megawatt site, drawing power comparable to about 100,000 homes, may support only around 100 lasting jobs.
What happens next: The senators sent detailed information requests to all seven companies in December 2025 and combined the responses with a year of interviews to build the report. None of the companies offered comprehensive, quantitative proof of permanent job creation despite accepting billions in subsidies. The report carries no binding force on its own, but it lays groundwork for state and federal lawmakers to revisit tax incentive rules, NDA practices, and cost-sharing standards for who pays when a data center strains the local grid.