For the first time in decades, America needs to produce more electricity.
In many places, a sharp uptick in power demand has been driven by data centers, the industrial buildings that house huge banks of computer servers and support our increasingly digital society.
State lawmakers have long sought to attract such operations with generous tax breaks and incentives. But now, some are concerned that the infrastructure needed to add all those data centers to the electric grid will drive up residents’ utility bills. The growing use of artificial intelligence, which requires massive amounts of computing power, has added to that worry.
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