Big Tech isn’t the only big spender in the AI race.
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Spending on new power plants and transmission lines has reached record highs as utilities in the US try to meet the electricity demands of AI while modernizing the country’s aging electric grid.
By 2030, investor-owned utilities are on track to spend $1.4 trillion on capital expenditures, according to a new report from PowerLines, a consumer education nonprofit.
The projected total spend over the next five years exceeds the $1.3 trillion the industry reported spending over the last decade.
Training and using AI require massive amounts of power from data centers, and utilities across the country have said they will need to build extensive new infrastructure to serve their data center customers.
A PowerLines analysis of 51 utility earnings calls found that the increased spending was concentrated among a small group of key players.
Duke Energy plans to spend $102.2 billion in capital expenditures by 2030, the most of any investor-owned utility in the US. Duke serves customers in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina, all of which are experiencing increased electricity demand driven by data centers.
Southern Company plans to shell out $81.2 billion. Southern serves data center projects in several southern US states, including a Meta campus in Huntsville, Alabama, and Microsoft’s growing network in Georgia.
American Electric Power plans to spend $72 billion by 2030. AEP battled the data center industry last year over a proposed tariff in Ohio. Regulators approved the tariff in July, which requires financial commitments from data centers seeking a grid connection through AEP Ohio.
In the US, investor-owned utilities often seek state regulators’ approval to recoup their high infrastructure costs from their customers.
Electric and gas utilities sought to raise customer bills by $31 billion in 2025, more than double the amount sought in 2024, according to a PowerLines report released earlier this year.
This way of conducting business has sparked a fierce debate across the country over who should pay for the AI boom.
Last month, tech companies including Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI signed President Donald Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, a voluntary agreement intended to prevent tech companies from driving up consumer electricity bills over the cost of powering data centers.
