The Data Center Backlash, Answered With Numbers

A data center's effect on electricity prices depends partly on whether its payments help cover existing infrastructure or require expensive new capacity. In Ng's defense of data centers, Andrew Ng emphasizes the first possibility: large customers can share the grid's fixed costs.

A 2025 electricity-price analysis supports that mechanism within a specific historical scope. It associates growing state-level demand during 2019 to 2024 with lower average retail prices after inflation, consistent with spreading fixed costs across more electricity sales. The same analysis warns that future demand can raise prices when new supply and delivery infrastructure are constrained or costly. A statewide historical relationship therefore cannot settle what a particular proposed facility will do to household bills.