Will AI Soon Cause Our Electricity Bills To Explode?

While AI is interfering absolutely everywhere in our daily lives in sometimes invisible ways, there is something very concrete that we don’t always think about: gigantic data centers that swallow up astronomical quantities of electricity. And we are the ones who risk paying this bill.

The Americans are already toasting

Across the Atlantic, the awakening is brutal. In some areas near data centers, electricity bills increased by 36% between 2020 and 2025. The mechanism is simple, but relentless. Data centers consume so much electricity that they saturate local networks.

So, power companies must invest billions in new infrastructure. And guess who ends up paying? Consumers, obviously. In the PJM region (the largest US power grid), residents will pay $16.6 billion between 2025 and 2027 just to secure the supply of data centers.

Obviously, the opposition is organized in the face of such expenditure with the aim of offering functions that no one cares about on smartphones or even means of creating videos that are as crazy as they are useless. In 2025, at least 25 data center projects have been simply canceled following protests from local residents. Residents are fed up with indirectly subsidizing the energy appetite of tech giants.

OpenAI promises to foot the bill, but can it deliver?

Faced with growing discontent, OpenAI and Microsoft have just made big promises. OpenAI announced its “Stargate Community” plan where the company undertakes to “ pay your share of energy » et guarantees that its operations will not increase local bills. Microsoft had released the same speech a week earlier.

The problem ? OpenAI loses $8 to $14 billion per year. The company burns $2.25 to make just one. Of ChatGPT’s 800 million users, only 5% pay a subscription. Even the Premium plan at $200 per month causes every customer to lose money. Economist Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that OpenAI could run out of cash as early as mid-2027.

So these great promises of paid infrastructure? It’s actually a financial sleight of hand. OpenAI does not go into debt directly, it is mainly its partners such as Oracle, SoftBank and CoreWeave who have taken on $96 billion in debt to finance data center projects. Although it seems unlikely, if OpenAI goes bankrupt in two years, who will pay it back? And above all, who will pay the electricity bills for the infrastructure already built?

Will the French have to pay the AI bills?

The French government wants to be reassuring. Emmanuel Macron hammered it home during the AI Summit in February 2025, thanks to nuclear power, we produce carbon-free and controllable electricity. Better yet, our production exceeds our current needs and therefore, there is no need to increase it to accommodate data centers.

On paper, it holds up. French data centers currently consume 10 terawatt hours per year, or 2% of our national consumption. This is ten times less than Ireland, where this infrastructure swallows 21% of the country’s electricity. Be careful though, RTE, the French electricity network manager, forecasts a tripling of consumption by 2035. We would go from 10 to 28 terawatt hours. Ademe is counting on a multiplication by 3.7. And in the worst scenario, if all the announced projects come to fruition, we could reach 80 terawatt hours, or 15% of our current nuclear production.

Investments are pouring in with Microsoft, Amazon and Equinix where 109 billion euros were promised during the last summit. Microsoft plans its largest investment ever made in France with 6 billion. A giant 1.4 gigawatt campus is planned for 2028 in Île-de-France. To put things into perspective, a 10,000 m² data center consumes as much as a city of 50,000 inhabitants.

AI makes everything worse. A ChatGPT query uses ten times more energy than a Google search. Data centers dedicated to AI consume four to five times more than traditional data centers. AI already represents 20% of data center consumption and could reach 49% this year.

Who will pay the bill?

RTE has announced 53 billion euros of investments over 15 years to connect these new data centers. These costs are generally passed on to all consumers via TURPEthe tax on network use. Data centers also benefit from tax advantages. Until the end of 2025, they paid 0.50 euros per megawatt hour in electricity tax, well below the standard rate that other companies and individuals pay. Who makes up the difference? Us, once again.

Geographic concentration poses a problem. Île-de-France already represents 64% of national data center consumption. Marseille and Hauts-de-France follow. These regions risk experiencing the most brutal increases, with local networks under strain and massive investments to finance.

In the short term, the risk remains limited. Nuclear power gives us a few years of leeway. But between 2028 and 2035, when the major projects will be operational, the equation could become seriously complicated.